Ubuntu getting locked up

[Chuck Kuecker]

steve reilly wrote:
> Chuck Kuecker wrote:
>   
>> Dang - it just died again - the terminal started reporting i had a 
>> read-only filesystem, and my home directory was blank. Restarted, using 
>>     
>
> havent been following this thread too closley, so forgive me if this has 
> been suggested before.  went back through yesterdays posts and see now 
> your having a problem again.  that read-only filesystem, coupled with 
> running fsck and having inode problems sounds like your drive is in the 
> beginning stages of failure.
>
> you may want to look here https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Smartmontools
> if your drive is newer and has SMART capability .
>
>
> steve
>   
The big hard drives are both new Western Digital 500 Gb units.

When I came in this morning, the system was locked again. 
Control-printscreen R E I S U B did nothing. Rebooted from power-up, ran 
fsck again.

fsck always seems to show the same general range of numbers for the 
failures. It's always a corrupted orphan linked list failure.

When I looked at 'messages', I saw errors relating to my USB external 
drive. I've had trouble in the past with my Windows 2000 box, which is 
by the same manufacturer as the Linux box, locking up solid because of 
something related to the USB ports when running an external drive. I 
thought that was just Windows, as it went away when I removed the USB 
drive, but perhaps it's in the BIOS or motherboard. I pulled the USB 
drive on the Linux box - we shall see if that helps.

I'll check out smartmontools and report back. Thanks!

Chuck Kuecker

Update - it's happened again. The Linux machine has an error that the 
sensor applet failed, and did not reload correctly when I tried to 
restart it. Coincidence - or clue?
Kern.log shows a bunch of 'corrupted low memory @ c00044c8 (44c8 phys) = 
00FFFFFF. Is this in my plug-in memory modules? I've got 1.1 Gb RAM - 
two 500 Mb modules and one older module. Could it be that the two 
different modules don't play together well? Strange - it took three 
months for the problem to crop up.

Another clue? 'Metacity' shows a window with box characters where the 
text ought to be - and the control-printscreen sequence is dead again. 
The mouse is frozen, too.

OK - might have cured the beast - the cable for HDD1 was intermittent. 
Replaced it, booting now. Re-ran fsck from the live CD. It boots OK now.

I'll be keeping an eye on this machine for a while.

CK