[ubuntu-uk] Ubuntu Crashing

[Seif Attar]

Hello,

Thanks for the email, somehow Michael's email slipped though my
fingers! :S and your email made go back to look for his email!

On Tue, 2008-02-05 at 21:57 +0000, Neil Greenwood wrote:
> On 05/02/2008, Michael Holloway <michael at thedarkwinter.com> wrote:
> > A log file that might help you diagnose is /var/log/messages - if there
> > is anything interesting in there, post it here and we'll have a look.
> >
> 
> Something that Michael didn't make clear, just in case you're new to
> Linux, is that messages written to /var/log/messages survive past a
> reboot, so you don't have to worry about losing anything when you have
> to do the hard shutdown.

I have looked in /var/log/messages, couldn't find anything there,
anyways, it didn't crash today, maybe because I was home all day and was
using it all the time (or the kernel headers update?). It'll probably be
crashed by tomorrow morning, and i'll messages again.

> Another reference that might help is this forum page
> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=617349
> It describes some key presses you can use to save information to the
> disk before doing the hard shutdown/reboot - it helps to stop you
> needing to fsck (i.e. check the disk) when you next boot.
> One final thing to try: when the machine 'locks up', try swapping to a
> virtual terminal (Ctrl+Alt+F1), logging in and typing 'dmesg'. If the
> machine isn't totally dead, that might give you some info that would
> help debug the problem.

thanks for that, I can't really check this right now, as we are watching
a movie on mythtv (nice) and i dont want to crash it! so I'll check this
later, but I highly doubt that it will work, as not even the num lock or
caps lock buttons work.

It could be a power problem as Michael suggested, I havent disabled
anything in the bios, will try that on next crash. One thing worth
mentioning is that I do notice weird behaviour with my external hard
drive, if i restart the computer, it is mounted normally (/home in fstab
using uuid, XFS), but if i shutdown let the drives power off, and then
power on again, it fails to mount. and i have to manually change tty and
mount it, but since I wasn't planning on powering the machine off often,
this didn't bother me, but maybe it's realted to the hanging? could it
be that ubuntu puts hard drivers to sleep and doesn't get them back on?
maybe, anyways, i'll keep you up to date as soon as i get anything.
thanx for the help.

Peace,
Seif A.
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