Arch Linux

slightlystoopid

Member

Registered: 2009-09-10

Posts: 61

Relatively frequent system freezes

First I notice my cursor freeze on screen. When this happens, I'm still able to do things like send messages through pidgin, but if I try to run anything else, shut down X, or drop to terminal, the system becomes completely unresponsive. I can immediately reboot from a pty, but the system will not shutdown cleanly. I see no indication that a shutdown happened in the logs, but neither do I see any indication of any problems. Depending on what I had done recently, the fsck will take anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 minutes. Of course, when it takes longer than a minute, there's some pretty obvious problems after reboot. About an hour ago, I went through this process, and nautilus and gnome-panel were segfaulting when starting X. So I tried reinstalling the gnome group, which during integrity check told me the packages in cache were corrupt, then I find my mirrorlist file is empty for some reason, and because of a recent update to wavpack, wavpack was showing up as not installed, but the files still existed in the filesystem requiring manual deletion. I'm sure there's more subtle corruption as well that'll gradually creep in and become more and more apparent until the system becomes unuseable and demands a complete reinstall. Cases like this have become more and more frequent over the past couple months, but I see no reason to believe it's software related. I'm guessing power supply or perhaps maybe motherboard. Anyone with more experience in these situations be able to verify or clarify this for me?

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One nation, under the corporatocracy, indivisible, with liberty for them.

Really, I can understand the Supreme Court's rulings. Afterall, corporations are people just like us, with love and feelings, hopes and dreams, and a limited lifespan to do it all in... oh wait, nevermind. I was thinking of same-sex marriage.

rowdog

Member

From: East Texas

Registered: 2009-08-19

Posts: 118

Re: Relatively frequent system freezes

In my experience, this kind of random crashing is usually caused by bad ram so I'd start with memtest86.

slightlystoopid

Member

Registered: 2009-09-10

Posts: 61

Re: Relatively frequent system freezes

Ah, forgot to mention: Memtest86+ runs smooth repeatedly, and mprime's blend test can run for 12 hours without a hitch.

That was the first thing I thought too though. I was thinking maybe timings were set too low, but memtest86 and mprime would err if that were the case, right?

Last edited by slightlystoopid (2009-11-03 14:55:59)

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One nation, under the corporatocracy, indivisible, with liberty for them.

Really, I can understand the Supreme Court's rulings. Afterall, corporations are people just like us, with love and feelings, hopes and dreams, and a limited lifespan to do it all in... oh wait, nevermind. I was thinking of same-sex marriage.