I am running Ubuntu Edgy, and I've been having problems of my system randomly freezing. ctrl-alt-backspace doesn't do anything and neither does escape. I have to do a hard restart to get it back to a usable state. There is nothing specific that I do that is making it crash. I have tried turning off Hyperthreading on the CPU but that didn't help. I also installed a pentium specific kernel for the os and that didn't help either. I am running beryl, but its been happening since before I installed it. I am not exactly sure what other information you would need to help me out, left me know what logs I should post.

Pentium 4 3ghz dual core hyper threaded
1 gig of ram
Radeon 9700

It was -34° F here last night, weather is probably not much different there heh! (have you ever watched Doug & Doug "heh!")

I have a solid distro called Mandrake 10.2 that did that to me not too long ago, my jaw dropped, I was confused. I had a compressed image of it that I re-loaded in it's place in a few minutes but that did'nt help. After that I spent the entire evening re-building from scratch off CD's over & over & over again to no avail. Previously I was trying to get a LT modem (the only one that will work in 64 bit system) up in Fedora, of which I had tried about 100 or so times and finally got it going after applying a couple choice updates from Fedora's site. But that modem would loose it's speed after half an hour in Fedora. So after a few tries getting my trusty Mandrake back to no avail I finally pulled that modem out and was able to re-load Mandrake and it is back as dependable as before.

The freezing was because of bad hardware.

It sounds like a hardware problem as it is not just been happening in ubuntu and it might be a problem with the RAM perhaps?

to rule it out you could test it thoroughly with memtest86

ok, thanks for the tips. Yea..it hasn't been that cold here. 40 F at night and like 60-70 during the day :P

I ran the memtest for 2 passes, 35 minutes and it didn't find anything. I do have a bad DVD drive, could that be it, but I'm not trying to read anything from the dvd drive.

i would doubt the DVD drive is causing the problems,

how hot is the cpu running? overheating does cause problems, i had an over heating pc that used to reboot itself which wasn't very helpful!

40° F!!!
So you did'nt have to brave the cold to plow 2 feet of fresh snow like me on my quarter mile long driveway I take it?
You know, in some ways, you got it good.
I happen to live in what appears to be the only part of the world that has an actual "REAL" winter.

Sorry for not using this forum as it was intended.
Good luck.

The CPU runs at about 80 or 90 F, but thats a meter on my case. Is there one that runs on Linux?

How to interpret memtest results.

If memtest says it's faulty then bad it is.
If memtest says it's good then it means nothing - it still may be bad.

Try removing half of the RAM and then put it back and pull off the other half, or get a known good stick for testing.

I don't think its my memory because Windows runs perfectly fine. I'm thinking I'll jsut install a different distro or something.

Windows does not use the same memory region as Linux for loading core components. But well, it's your box.

Ok, I tried vacuuming out my computer, and that about lowered my computer's temperature down by 10 degrees, but it still froze. So I added "noapic nolapic pci=noapc" to my kernel in grub's menu.lst. So far so good.

Well, it didn't work. It still freezes.

It's actually pci=noapic, if that helps any.

Are you certain there isn't something the same that's open or running every time it freezes? I had a similar problem once last year and after some serious thinking over a couple days I realized it's always whenever ndiswrapper is loaded. Wether a card was inserted or not and wether a browser was open or not, just having the module loaded was the cause.

Think hard. Look deep.