Crashing with Dell

Matt Patterson matt at v8zman.com
Wed Aug 24 06:01:58 UTC 2005


Hard lockups are generally a hardware issue. Turn off graphics 
acceleration (and if you are using the nvidia binary drivers also 
disable the agp support). The ram is a good place to look as well, try 
running the memtest feature that is on the boot menu. I always start by 
pulling all unimportant cards (that includes pulling all but one memory 
stick) and all unimportant accessories and then seeing if I can 
reproduce the problem. Also see if there is a way you can cause the 
problem to occur regularly, like starting and stopping glxgears, or 
running the bonnie++ hard disk and io tests.

Another random thought, look at the voltages displayerd in the hardware 
monitor features in the bios. If anything is too far off, or the 
temps/fan speeds are wrong you might be able to move towards that, low 
possibility though.

Matt



Dennis_Drescher at sil.org wrote:

>I've been using Ubuntu for a couple months now on both a Dell Precision 
>330 and a Latitude D610. Off and on I've had problems with what I'll call 
>hard crashes. What I mean is that the machine completely locks up and will 
>not allow me to take it down by going into a shell. The only way to 
>recover is to power down. This obviously wreaks havoc on my file structure 
>and I have to run fsck often to fix the partitions. The Latitude, which is 
>running Ubuntu 5.0.4 (with the KDE desktop installed) locks up 
>infrequently and it is hard to predict. The Precision 330 locks up several 
>times a day. Sometimes while I'm typing or using the mouse, many times 
>just while it is sits idle.
>
>I've used Linux for several years now and have never had such an unstable 
>system. I also run Kanotix on both machines in another partition and it 
>can run all day long with no problems. I've also run checks on my hardware 
>and I'm confident it is functioning okay. I'm thinking it might be a 
>problem with X but I'm not sure what to do at this point. Can anyone give 
>me some clues as to how to diagnose this? Thanks.
>
>Regards,
>
>Dennis
>
>
>  
>





More information about the ubuntu-users mailing list