Re: System Completely Locks Up 4-5 hours After Logging In

[Jesse Sweetland]

The cable I'm using came with the PC, which I bought in February. The drive it came with is ATA133, so I can only assume the cables are rated for that. The Maxtor was OEM, so it didn't come with a cable, unfortunately.

The computer stays off, idle, or (hehe) locked up most of the day so I can't see how the drive would overheat...I just reached in and touched it and it feels a little warm but not hot (I used to run a mirror that did 12GB/day of traffic...the Maxtor isn't nearly as hot as that other drive got ;)

According to the spec sheet the power supply is 160 W. Huh. That seems kind of low, but (supposedly) I should be able to support 4 IDE devices (which I have). Plus, under the current hardware configuration, I've successfully run SuSE and Windows XP.

I just install RH 8.0 on the other drive (a Western Digital...the one that came with the box) and I'll let you know how that turns out.


On Thursday, November 14, 2002, at 09:00 PM, Robert L. Cochran wrote:

I am wondering about 3 things:

Are your drive cables rated for ATA133? Are they brand new? You did use
the nice, new cable that Maxtor packed with the drive, did you? And you
did not break off or bend a connector pin?

Is your hard drive overheating? Drives can get hot enough to roast
fingers. You can get hard drive coolers at any CompUSA.

Is your power supply defective or just does not offer enough power? I
would think you need at least a 350 watt power supply, and I don't know
what a stock Gateway offers.

Thanks

Bob Cochran
Greenbelt, Maryland, USA



On Thu, 2002-11-14 at 21:19, Jesse Sweetland wrote:

This is very likely the case. I tried turning off UDMA for both drives
in my machine in the BIOS and so far I haven't had any luck. I have a
hard time believing it's a bum drive since 1) the darn thing is (almost)
brand new; and 2) it works with Linux...is there anything else I could
try?

Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2002 13:58:42 -0800
From: Jack Bowling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: System Completely Locks Up 4-5 hours After Logging In
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

On Thu, Nov 14, 2002 at 03:10:47PM -0600, Jesse Sweetland wrote:

Hi,

I've been wrestling with this problem since 8.0 was released and I

haven't

found a solution yet in any of the other forums (there is an extensive
thread on the subject at LinuxISO.org/RedHat forum). 4 or 5 hours

after

logging into the box the system freezes up completely with the

following

symptoms:

- no video updates
- mouse does not function
- keyboard does not function
- network traffic stop
- cannot SSH into the box
- cannot ping the box

At first I did not experience these problems with SuSE 8.0. By

default SuSE

8.0 puts the kernel in a /boot/ partition formatted as ext2. I

re-installed

SuSE I put everything on reiserFS (forgetting that /boot/ should be

on ext2)

and I began to experience the same kind of freezes. So I re-installed

SuSE

again with everything on ext2 and everything worked. Thinking I had

found

the problem I re-installed RedHat 8.0 and put everything on ext2 and

the

freezes starting happening more frequently before (on the order of a

couple

of minutes rather than a couple of hours).

One thing worth mentioning--one time right before a SuSE lock up I

saw in

the xconsole window a message about kernel: /dev/hdb: lost interrupt

or

something along those lines. I checked the /proc/irq and everything

seems to

be in order. I had thought the problem was running the kernel from a
journaling filesystem, but this apparently is not the case, since I

have

reproduced the problem on an ext2 installation. I ran SuSE's memory
test...17 hours and no failures. I reformatted my drive with ext2 and

did

bad block checking...no bad blocks. The computer is new and the RAM

My computer is a Gateway 500S that's about 6 months old. It has an

Intel

845PT chipset with the CPU/LAN configuration with integrated ADI 1885

audio

chip (currently disabled) and Intel 8256ET NIC. I have an

after-market ATI

Radeo 64MB DDR (retail box) video card and an after-market OEM

SoundBlaster

Audigy MP3+. The drive I am trying to install on is a 80GB Maxtor

7200 RPM.

I've tried partitioning in several different configurations but

nothing

seems to help. Right now I'm running SuSE with the kernel on /boot/

(ext2)

and / on ReiserFS and it's working fine.

In the LinuxISO.org forum I found 2 or 3 other people with the same

problem.

Has anyone else seen anything like this? Any suggestions for further
troubleshooting?

I had exactly the same thing happen to me. The box was locking during
overnight backups. Turned out one of the hard drives was kacking with
improper DMA settings. I replaced the drive and everything started

working. Try to determine if the box is locking on hard drive access.

--
Jack Bowling
mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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