i'm using an external hard drive connected to my laptop via usb. under suse 9.2 my system crashes quite often. i never had this problem under mandrake 10.1. are there any remedies? also, is there something like ctr+alt+del under linux?

Do you have the proper settings in your kernel to be doing that? If you do then I don't know what else could help since I don't have an external hd.

Hope I helped

The three finger salute usually works under linux too - did you try? - however, thee is a two-finger version that I can't quite remember ... alt-backspace or ctrl backspce or something like that. (I won't experiment right now - thanks.)

What sort of crashing are you talking about? Sounds like system hangs hmmm? Since it's usb there's all sorts of things that can happen - right down to wiggley (badly seated) usb plugs (they get loose with age - I'm always reseating mine.)

I think mandrake is less fussy than suse in any road. I take it your laptop internal hdd is reserved for windo$e?

i am running a dual boot machine with the internal hd split 10gig win to 30 gig linux. i only use win side for flash mx work. my problem is that if the system hangs/freezes, is there something i can do instead of rebooting? would running the external 250gig drive from firewire be better undedr linux?

I am not sure about this, but couldn't it be that way the drive is mounted? I assume you use submount per default and this probably mounts the drive with the option 'sync', as it would do with a small USB drive. Maybe a large HDD would prefer to be mounted with cached write operations (use 'async' or default paramter). This is just a guess. I have no experience in this matter!

thanks for the suggestion, i will get back to you on it.

i'm using this external hard drive:

http://aka.fotovista.com/dev/small/12350054.jpg

i dont think there's a way to fix the bug, its just the way suse works i suppose. mandrake didnt give me these problems. there must be a way to stop it from freezing on me ...