[SOLVED] System freeze/slowness with ACPI

z0id · 2011-04-06 13:05:02

After many many days of working flawlessly, after I turned on my laptop today I noticed it was loading reaaly slow - par example, it stayed about 20 sec at the nvidia driver splash screen. I forcibly shut it down and rebooted, but then it would freeze somewhere at startup (usually loading modules). I tried booting windooze, but it would also freeze at startup (except in Safe Mode).
Thinking it's a hdd problem, I took my Ultimate Boot CD (usb stick) and voila... none of the tools would start, complaining about a missing cd-rom driver (?!).

It's worth mentioning that I have two arch installs: the stable one, for everyday use and a testing one (for gnome3, etc). So, playing around with kernel parameters in grub, I get the following results:
Stable arch:
- normal boot: it freezes
- acpi=off: it boots, but veery slowly, again. dmesg sais:

ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x207 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
atat1.00: irq_stat 0x40000008
ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED
[...]
ata1.00: status:: { DRDY ERR }
ata1.00: error: { UNC }
ata1.00 configured for UDMA/133
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Unhandled sense code
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda]  Result: hostbyte=0x00 driverbyte=0x08
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda]  Sense Key : 0x3 [current] [descriptor]
Descriptor sense data with sense descriptors (in hex):
  <here be some hex values>
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda]  ASC=0x11 ASCQ=0x4
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: cdb[0]=0x28:  <more hex>
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 128229918
ata1: EH complete

Also, the hdd led is lit, but iotop doesn't report any activity.
Testing arch:
- normal boot: it freezes
- acpi=off: works well

I'm not even sure if it's a software or hardware problem.
Please help.

Last edited by z0id (2011-04-09 15:57:50)

lagagnon · 2011-04-06 13:31:31

From those dmesg error messages I would say your hard drive is failing. I work with recycled older computers and those types of messages are definitely indicative of a failing hard drive. You should back up your data ASAP if you can get a Live Linux CD or Linux on a USB stick to boot.

z0id · 2011-04-09 15:57:27

Seems you were right - I managed to scan the HDD surface for bad sectors and had them remapped. I think the tools I tried previously were not compatibile with my system or smth.
I'm marking this as solved. Thanks

Arch Linux

#1 2011-04-06 13:05:02

[SOLVED] System freeze/slowness with ACPI

#2 2011-04-06 13:31:31

Re: [SOLVED] System freeze/slowness with ACPI

#3 2011-04-09 15:57:27

Re: [SOLVED] System freeze/slowness with ACPI

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