I'm having intermittent trouble with FC5 which sometimes locks up when booting. Each time it does this, it gets as far as "enabling swap space" but then the command line read-out stops. I've tried letting it run a long time, but that's not the problem. (On a successful boot, this line lasts only a few seconds, 10 or so, until moving on to the next line.)

I'd say it fails on boot maybe 1 time in 5. When it locks up while booting, I hit the warm boot button and try again.

I'm running an i-686 with a total of 85 MB of disk space on the system. As far as I can tell, all of the disk drives are responding normally.

I have an occasionally system lock up while running and it has been suggested this is a swap space problem, but I cannot confirm this. (Any ideas how I could do that?)

Does anyone have any information on why a boot attempt would fails sometimes but succeed others? Any suggestions on what I should check out?

Thanks,
- Bill

I assume you mean 85 GB of HD space.

If you are locking on boot you may try removing your RAM, gently cleaning the connectors and reinserting them. I've seen dirty RAM connection cause that. Defective RAM will also cause that.

How much RAM do you have in the machine? How much swap space?

Yes, I mean 85 GB nominal (sorry, a typo there). The machine has three hard drives, marketed as a 40, a 25 and a 20 GB.

I really think there is something wrong with the Logical Volume Management that I default-installed when moving to FC5.

Here's reading from the LVM interface:

> Volume Groups
..> VolGroup00
....> VolGroup 00 Physical view
.........format: lvm2
.........attributes: wz-n-
.........Volume Group Size: 37.16G
.........Available Space: 32.00M
.........Total Number of Extants: 1189
.........Number of Free Extants: 1
.........Extant Size: 32.00M
.........Maximum Allowed Physical Volumes: 256
.........Number of Physical Volumes: 1
.........Number of Logical Volumes: 2
.......> /dev/hda
..........Partition 2
............Physical Volume Name: /dev/hda2
............Volume Group Name: VolGroup00
............Volume Group Size: 37.16G
............Space Used: 37.12G
............Space Free: 32.00M
............Total Number of Extants: 1189
............Allocated Physical Extants: 1189
............Attributes: a-
....> VolGroup 00 Logical view
..........format: lvm2
..........attributes: wz-n-
..........Volume Group Size: 37.16G
..........Available Space: 32.00M
..........Total Number of Extants: 1189
..........Number of Free Extants: 1
..........Extant Size: 32.00M
..........Maximum Allowed Physical Volumes: 256
..........Number of Physical Volumes: 1
..........Number of Logical Volumes: 2
.......> LogVol00
..........Logical Volume Name: LogVol00
..........Volume Group Name: VolGroup00
..........Logical Volume Group Size: 36.62G
..........Number of Segments: 1
..........Attributes: -wi-ao
..........Mount Point: / Root Filesystem
..........Mount Point when Rebooted: / Root Filesystem
..........File System: Ext3
.......> LogVol01
..........Logical Volume Name: LogVol01
..........Volume Group Name: VolGroup00
..........Logical Volume Group Size: 512.00MB
..........Number of Segments: 1
..........Attributes: -wi-ao
..........Mount Point: Unmounted
..........Mount Point when Rebooted: swap
..........File System: swap
> Uninitialized Entities
..> /dev/hda
..........Partition1
............Size: 0.10GB
............Partition Type: Linux (0x83)
............Mount Point: /boot
............Mount Point when Rebooted: /boot
............File System: Ext3
..../dev/hdb
..........Size 19.08GB
..........Partition Type: NONE
..........Mount Point: Unmounted
..........Mount Point when Rebooted: None
..........File System: No Filesystem
..../dev/hdd
..........Size 18.65GB
..........Partition Type: NONE
..........Mount Point: /usr/d.folder/Documents
..........Mount Point when Rebooted: /usr/d.folder/Documents
..........File System: No Filesystem

To help make sense of this, it helps to know how the second two hard drives were introduced to the system to provide data storage.

The usual Linux system was installed first on a single hard drive. The root directory looks like this:
/
/bin
/boot
/dev
/etc
/home
/(and so on through ...)
/sys
/tmp
/usr
/var

To, this was added a hard drive "d.folder" at /usr/d.folder, and it is the mount point for hdb. The directory there is
/usr/d.folder/BKeeper
/usr/d.folder/Documents
/usr/d.folder/GradeBkW
/usr/d.folder/Mail
/usr/d.folder/Planner
/usr/d.folder/Website

Later, to this was added a third hard drive, hdd, at the mount point /usr/d.folder/Documents. That is, all of the document storage exists on hdb and hdd, with most of the second level directories on hdb and a single second level directory on hdd.

I don't understand why LVM thinks hdb is "Unmounted" with "File System: No Filesystem." Actually, the drive is there, responds well, and is read/write accessible.

Both hdb and hdd were *excluded* in the install of FC5, thus when LVM went in, it does not include them.

The unit has 256MB RAM. I can tell it's all usable:

# /usr/bin/free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 255780 251372 4408 0 14012 112904
-/+ buffers/cache: 124456 131324
Swap: 524280 17040 507240

So, I am full of questions. It looks to me like I have available swap space, and I can clearly see I have storage space on hda2, hdb and hdd.

I think the "empty" and "no space" indication from the LVM report are simply telling me all the area on the disk is accounted for, not that the disk is overfull.

Got any ideas?

- Bill

It'd hard to tell what you have from that.

What are the outputs to
fdisk has to be run as root. Those will show what your partitions are, what kind, what is mounted and where, and how much free space is left.

Here is the response:

# fdisk
bash: fdisk: command not found
# fdisk -s
bash: fdisk: command not found
# mount
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 on / type ext3 (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
/dev/hda1 on /boot type ext3 (rw)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
/dev/hdb1 on /usr/d.folder type ext3 (rw)
/dev/hdd on /usr/d.folder/Documents type ext3 (rw)
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)
sunrpc on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw)
automount(pid1968) on /net type autofs (rw,fd=4,pgrp=1968,minproto=2,maxproto=4)
# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
36G 25G 9.3G 73% /
/dev/hda1 99M 15M 80M 16% /boot
tmpfs 887M 0 887M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hdb1 19G 924M 17G 6% /usr/d.folder
/dev/hdd 19G 8.7G 8.8G 50% /usr/d.folder/Documents
#

I took the earlier advice, unseated, checked contacts and reseated the RAM card. Also, for good measure I went on a shopping spree. Moved from 0.25 GB RAM to 1.75 GB RAM. Now the available memory shows as

# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1815724 495756 1319968 0 22692 309028
-/+ buffers/cache: 164036 1651688
Swap: 524280 0 524280
#

But the lock ups continue. As I say, intermittently.

- Bill


Also, for good measure: