Arch Linux

DWilliams

Member

From: Everywhere

Registered: 2009-11-22

Posts: 119

Something terrible going wrong with my system

I don't even know how to solidly define all the errors I'm having, so many things seem to be broken almost overnight. I hope somebody can help me diagnose whatever is going wrong here via logs or whatever

It roughly seems to have started the other day when we had a quick power blackout. My system is on a surge protector but of course my system shutdown abruptly. When I booted it back up, instead of booting normally, it came up with some kernel related errors and stalled. I rebooted and it seemingly came up fine.

Tonight, I was playing a game in Wine and it started randomly crashing. Other games I tried also randomly crashed or didn't work at all.

I went back to my desktop and tried to start viewing log files for any errors, but I didn't find anything that stuck out to me. Granted, I'm not the most log-oriented person so if somebody tells me what to look for I can go back and see. While poking through log files, I got randomly logged out and thrown back to my GNOME login screen. I logged back in, and other random issues presented themselves, such as Firefox randomly crashing any time I used it. After a while everything was completely shut down and I got put to some black screen with a graphic in the middle (I assume from GNOME 3) saying an error occurred that my system could not recover from.

I rebooted and things seem to be functioning more normally but I'm pretty sure it's only temporary. The only oddity I notice at the moment is that for some unknown reason, pacman hangs for several minutes when trying to sync mirrors

What's going on here?

kolos

Member

Registered: 2010-05-15

Posts: 57

Re: Something terrible going wrong with my system

mm the first thing that i would do is to check the ram and hd for errors

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och noes!

ngoonee

Forum Fellow

From: Between Thailand and Singapore

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 7,355

Re: Something terrible going wrong with my system

Yes, a long time ago when I got random crashes and stuff after a hard reboot (bad electrical supply) I ended up reinstalling every package on the system to solve it. Of course, backups are highly recommended.

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Allan-Volunteer on the (topic being discussed) mailn lists. You never get the people who matters attention on the forums.
jasonwryan-Installing Arch is a measure of your literacy. Maintaining Arch is a measure of your diligence. Contributing to Arch is a measure of your competence.
Griemak-Bleeding edge, not bleeding flat. Edge denotes falls will occur from time to time. Bring your own parachute.

scenox

Member

Registered: 2010-07-19

Posts: 63

Re: Something terrible going wrong with my system

When you are really unlucky, your hard disk is fucked up and you will need a new one

DWilliams

Member

From: Everywhere

Registered: 2009-11-22

Posts: 119

Re: Something terrible going wrong with my system

So I've poked through my logs some more and it seems that most everything which is crashing randomly is doing so with a segfault

gnome-shell crashing:

Jun  3 18:58:12 localhost kernel: [ 3917.359713] gnome-shell[2403]: segfault at 7ff3e03120b0 ip 00007ff408ace4e1 sp 00007fff7c23d010 error 4 in libmozjs.so[7ff408a73000+32d000]

Teamspeak crashing:

Jun  3 19:00:54 localhost kernel: [ 4079.282145] ts3client_linux[2544]: segfault at 1ae2050 ip 00007f895583ead9 sp 00007fffb00ff660 error 6 in libQtGui.so.4.
7.3[7f8955578000+a37000]

Plus others. If I run firefox from a terminal and it crashes, it sends "Segmentation fault" back to the terminal.

I guess I'll start by letting memtest86 run for a while. Are there any other diagnostic tools I can run?

graysky

Wiki Maintainer

From: :wq

Registered: 2008-12-01

Posts: 10,597

Website

Re: Something terrible going wrong with my system

mprime will check for CPU instabilities

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CPU-optimized Linux-ck packages @ Repo-ck  • AUR packages • Zsh and other configs

scenox

Member

Registered: 2010-07-19

Posts: 63

Re: Something terrible going wrong with my system

smartmontools or
e2fsprogs: badblocks -n -v /dev/HDD_DEVICE

DWilliams

Member

From: Everywhere

Registered: 2009-11-22

Posts: 119

Re: Something terrible going wrong with my system

Alright, I'm pretty confident I have bad RAM now.

I ran memtest86 and it produced thousands of errors. I've heard people say sometimes the motherboard will incorrectly detect the speed/voltage for memory so I went into my BIOS and manually set the speed and voltage to what it expects, but the errors still showed up.

I'll try re-seating the RAM and hope it just got knocked loose or something.

The strange thing, though, is that rebooting always seems to clear up the problems for a few hours. It will get really bad with everything crashing left and right and then I reboot and it acts normally for a while.

graysky

Wiki Maintainer

From: :wq

Registered: 2008-12-01

Posts: 10,597

Website

Re: Something terrible going wrong with my system

You said you did but this but what is the voltage rating on the memory and what have you set the VRAM setting for in the BIOS?  Is this DDR2 or DDR3?  How many sticks do you have?

Last edited by graysky (2011-06-04 01:36:40)

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CPU-optimized Linux-ck packages @ Repo-ck  • AUR packages • Zsh and other configs

DWilliams

Member

From: Everywhere

Registered: 2009-11-22

Posts: 119

Re: Something terrible going wrong with my system

You said you did but this but what is the voltage rating on the memory and what have you set the VRAM setting for in the BIOS?  Is this DDR2 or DDR3?  How many sticks do you have?

It's two 2GB sticks of DDR3 1600. I manually set the speed to 1600, and the voltage is supposed to be 1.65v according to the newegg page so I set it to that.