Hello,

I'm experiencing a strange problem since last few days. My linux is
crashing totally very soon after the boot-up. The keyboard and mouse
controls freez soon after x-windows starts. I tried totally
reinstalling the system and it still happens. I've tried two flavors
of linux - redhat 9.0 and knoppix 3.3. For both flavors, everytime
this happens, my keyboard's CapsLock and ScrollLock lights starts
flashing. I've also tried Ctrl+Alt+BackSpace to restart x-windows but
it doesn't work.

It was working well since long time. Being an intermediate linux user,
I'm not able to find out what's going on. Any help will be
appreciated.

Thanks a lot,
Teonardo

On 26 Nov 2003 22:05:05 -0800, teonardodavinci@yahoo.com (Teonardo) wrote:

please specify your machine's h/w
..
--
/// Michael J. Tobler: motorcyclist, surfer, skydiver, \\\
\\\ and author: "Inside Linux", "C++ HowTo", "C++ Unleashed" ///
Bankers do it with interest (penalty for early withdrawal).

On 26 Nov 2003 22:05:05 -0800, teonardodavinci@yahoo.com (Teonardo) wrote:

.... you're also grasping, by x-posting to so many groups. if two
diff distros are having issues, sounds like a h/w issue
..
--
/// Michael J. Tobler: motorcyclist, surfer, skydiver, \\\
\\\ and author: "Inside Linux", "C++ HowTo", "C++ Unleashed" ///
What I want is all of the power and none of the responsibility.

Teonardo wrote:
Sounds like a hardware problem.
Pull all cards, memory, CPU's, out and reseat them.
Make sure all fans are working properly.
Unplug all cables (CAT5, printer, mouse, monitor, etc...) and
reconnect them.
Run a test on the memory.

Just a few things to try.
--
Confucius: He who play in root, eventually kill tree.
Registered with The Linux Counter. http://counter.li.org/
Slackware 9.1.0 Kernel 2.4.22 SMP i686 (GCC) 3.3.2
Uptime: 3 days, 7:21, 1 user, load average: 0.05, 0.13, 0.10

teonardodavinci@yahoo.com (Teonardo),
In a message on 26 Nov 2003 22:05:05 -0800, wrote :

T> Hello,
T>
T> I'm experiencing a strange problem since last few days. My linux is
T> crashing totally very soon after the boot-up. The keyboard and mouse
T> controls freez soon after x-windows starts. I tried totally
T> reinstalling the system and it still happens. I've tried two flavors
T> of linux - redhat 9.0 and knoppix 3.3. For both flavors, everytime
T> this happens, my keyboard's CapsLock and ScrollLock lights starts
T> flashing. I've also tried Ctrl+Alt+BackSpace to restart x-windows but
T> it doesn't work.
T>
T> It was working well since long time. Being an intermediate linux user,
T> I'm not able to find out what's going on. Any help will be
T> appreciated.

Some questions:

Have you changed any of the hardware (added 'new' memory, changed the
video card, etc.)?

What happens when you boot up in single user mode?

If you can boot up in single user mode, can you change the default
runlevel from 5 to 3 (edit /etc/inittab and find the section that looks
like this:

# Default runlevel. The runlevels used by RHS are:
# 0 - halt (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
# 1 - Single user mode
# 2 - Multiuser, without NFS (The same as 3, if you do not have networking)
# 3 - Full multiuser mode
# 4 - unused
# 5 - X11
# 6 - reboot (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
#
id:3:initdefault:

RH 9 *defaults* to 5 for a 'workstation' (and probably 'Personal
Desktop') install, change it to 3, as above.

Does the system behave any better?

If so, have a look at /var/log/messages and see if there is anything
there that is suggestive of hardware problems.

It *sounds* like you might have failing hardware. Another possibility is
that you have run out of disk space on your /var file system (or
whatever file system /var is on). Not having any free disk space will
cause the X11 startup to fail and then re-cycle endlessly, which will
appear like a sort of crash.


T>
T> Thanks a lot,
T> Teonardo
T>

\/
Robert Heller ||InterNet: heller@cs.umass.edu
http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/~heller || heller@deepsoft.com
http://www.deepsoft.com /\FidoNet: 1:321/153

On Thu, 27 Nov 2003 08:44:19 +0000, David wrote:

Visit http://www.memtest86.com/ for that. Many people think the memory
test during bootup is a good test, but it is a big fake - don't trust it.
MemTest86 really is the best for x86 memory testing.

Sybren
--
(o_ Q: God, root, what is difference?
//\ A: God can change the byte order on the CPU, root can't.
V_/_

David <thunderbolt01@netscape.net> wrote in message news:<DPixb.121966$Dw6.555035@attbi_s02>...
Also check out your ide cables (running from the motherboard to
internal drives). Did you recently add a new drive to your system?
Some combinations of devices on the same ide controller can cause this
problem, as can having the wrong type of cable (80- vs 40-conductor)
for whatever is connected. Also possible is having a bad ide cable.
Setting things up with only one device per ide controller could help
uncover the problem if this is the problem.

By the way, this kind of stuff would likely generate many entries in
the system log, assuming the kernel ever got to run. That would be a
good place to look for clues, assuming you can get into your system to
read it (or physically mount the drive on another machine, whatever it
takes).

When your system locks up, try ctrl-alt-f6 (or f5, f4, ...) instead of
ctrl-alt-backspace to see if you can connect to one of the
command-line virtual terminals. You might see a screenful of kernel
error messages on one of them.

Teonardo wrote:

AFAIK the flashing CapsLock & ScrollLock are trying to tell you an error
message - just loike the beloved BIOS beep messages - because the message
can't get displayed on your screen. Try changing you boot to level 3 (you
should be able to specify a run level at your boot loader, eg lilo: linux 3;
if not, boot into single user (linux 1, or init=/bin/sh), and edit your
default runlevel from that - in /etc/inittab [id:5:initdefault:]) and
running X (startx) from there.

Thanks to all of you for such prompt and nice responses. Some of
you've asked me questions to know more details on problem. Here I'm
trying to answer most of them....

Yes, I tried Ctrl+Alt+F[1-9] and tried to go single-user-mode
(virtual-terminal-mode) but had no success in getting there.

I agree with most of you on speculating some kind of hardware problem.
The only unusual thing I did was adding a 200GB hard drive. Now, for
this one, I had to add a PCI card which has another bios to support
large hard drives. I couldn't get that big hard drive to detect under
linux anyway. So, at present, I can only see it when I boot in
Windows. This whole upgrade in hardware may have caused such crashes
since mounting drive is one of the thing any distro does during
boot-up, I guess!.

I guess I missed to see if /var is full or not. I didn't know about
this concept before, I'll check it when it will happen again.

For the time being, I reinstalled my linux and trying out Fedora
Core's latest release. It seems to go smoothly so far (still not able
to see my 200GB HDD). It this one also crashes for similar reason,
I'll analyze logs and will try out unplugging most of extra hardwares.

Cheers
Teonardo


Robert Heller <heller@deepsoft.com> wrote in message news:<3747f$3fc5f91a$d0c7e1fd$2333@nf2.news-service.com>...