Arch Linux

northerw

Member

Registered: 2011-06-12

Posts: 33

Complete freeze on a 'fresh' installation, kernel panic?

Hello to everyone here,i'm only a few-day-old arch linux user, but a long time linux user, not an expert tho.
A couple hours ago i experienced a complete freeze of my pc (mouse pointer stuck and everything frozen, my wireless led was blinking so i guess network was still working), tried switching to virtual consoles, Ctrl+Alt+Back(even if that's deprecated by now iirc) or waiting to see if it was only temporary, but had to hard-reset my machine.
My installation is new, installed GNOME with a couple apps (firefox, banshee... with respective plugins/codecs), and NVIDIA Drivers (!) (through pacman). Gotta say i always had pretty bad times with almost any linux distros, most of the problems i had were graphic card related, even if different from time to time.
Recently passed on Arch for the flexibility and 'smoothness'  it offers. Took my time to read the whole (well almost) wiki, and tried it before removing my windows partition with a "testing" installation (i run that for 7/8 hours, didn't experienced any freeze and the only difference was i didn't have gdm installed, not saying that caused it).

I checked the everything.log and X log aswell without finding anything too wierd.
This is what is on everything.log at that time:
Jun 12 13:00:07 localhost -- MARK --
Jun 12 13:01:01 localhost /USR/SBIN/CROND[1263]: (root) CMD (run-parts /etc/cron.hourly)
Jun 12 13:20:07 localhost -- MARK --
Jun 12 13:20:18 localhost kernel: [ 2424.004677] scsi scan: 96 byte inquiry failed.  Consider BLIST_INQUIRY_36 for this device

Can't include X log cause i can't find relevant parts and some time has passed by now.

I read somewhere these kind of freezes may be caused by "physical" issues on the card, don't know if it's relevant but didn't have these kind of issues on Windows.
KMS, gdm and nvidia drivers seem to be the possibilities, but since it happened only once until now and 'apparently' didnt leave any trace to reproduce it i don't now what to do. I'm asking here because before installing softwares i will work with i wanna be sure that it won't happen again and even if what can i do to fix it.

Thanks in advance, and sorry for the wall of text, i'm just trying to be specific

northerw

Member

Registered: 2011-06-12

Posts: 33

Re: Complete freeze on a 'fresh' installation, kernel panic?

After reading https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=119034 i'm wondering if the issues can be connected, i'mnot sure in my case it's kernel panic since i got stuck on X and couldn't do anything, neither my pc has a quadcore processos, but when the freeze occured i actually had my external hd attached.

Any tip would be welcome, in the meantime i'm keeping my ext. hd connected to see if it happens again and/or if it happens when i haven't got it attached.

northerw

Member

Registered: 2011-06-12

Posts: 33

Re: Complete freeze on a 'fresh' installation, kernel panic?

Didn't have any more freezes since then, so i got even less clues about what could have caused it.
Anyways since it seems a quite harsh issue to detect what i'm asking is :
how can i deal AT BEST with another freeze if it'll happen? Last time i only tried switching to virtual consoles, then hard reset and logscheck. Can i do something else (either to undestand the problem or to deal with it)?

Thanks in advance