Arch Linux

John Karahalis

Member

Registered: 2009-01-27

Posts: 17

rsync locks up computer

I installed Arch on my laptop only a week ago.

For some reason, if the laptop is left idle for about an hour, it locks up. When I return, the screen is completely black. Ctrl + Alt + Backspace and REISUB do nothing. The only way out (that I know of) is to do a hard shutdown.

Has anybody heard of this before? Would laptop-mode-tools do anything to resolve this issue?

Last edited by John Karahalis (2009-03-07 22:05:56)

MilosC

Member

From: Serbia

Registered: 2008-06-04

Posts: 79

Re: rsync locks up computer

I think you don't have properly configured or even installed acpid: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Acpid.
Also, take a look on this: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Laptop?
And here you have a detailed tutorials for some laptops: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Cat … _(English).

John Karahalis

Member

Registered: 2009-01-27

Posts: 17

Re: rsync locks up computer

Thanks for those resources, I didn't know about some of them. The Laptop category on the Wiki is especially helpful.

Turns out my problem is even weirder. The lock up seems to happen only when my data is backed up to an external hard drive (which makes sense, because my computer usually does at least one backup if I leave it idle for a while). So far, I have seen tar and rsync cause problems.

The backup program will start, and about halfway through the computer will completely lock up. The logfiles indicate that the backups never finish. When I restart the computer, GNOME initially says that the external hard drive is unmounted (which never happens), but then mounts it immediately.

Have you ever heard of something like this?

John Karahalis

Member

Registered: 2009-01-27

Posts: 17

Re: rsync locks up computer

I resolved my issue and wanted to share it here on the Arch forums, in case anybody else runs into the same problem.

I was using rsync to back up to an external hard drive. The external drive has two partitions, an ext3 partition and a fat32 partition (rsync was backing up to the ext3 partition). I ran fsck on the ext3 partition and dosfsck -ar on the fat32 partition. There were no problems on the ext3 partition, but dosfsck reported that "There are differences between boot sector and its backup." when scanning the fat32 partition. I used dosfsck to resolve the problem, and now rsync has stopped locking up my computer.

If anyone knows why this fat32 issue was causing a problem on a separate partition, I would be interested to know.

Thanks for the help!