Freezes and SuSE 8.1
 

Hi All,

Like others in this list (and other lists) I have problems with random total freezes with a newly installed SuSE 8.1.
I think I've noticed something that points to what's causing the problem so maybe someone with appropriate knowledge can suggest a solution. Or maybe SuSE can try and reproduce the problem and fix it!

I have 2 drives, 1 with boot, windows, and home, the second with root and swap.
Generally when I do a new install I don't specify the home, I just hang it in later when I know everything is ok.
With 8.1, I noticed that when I had home from the first HD mounted the system freezes for no apparent reason. I mean total lock-ups here (sometimes sysRQ+b initiated a reboot, but often even that didn't work).

So I decided to copy the data from home (hda) to the /home on the second HD (hdb). But several attempts to copy resulted in total freezes.

So then (after rebooting again!) I started another copy and switched to the console (ctrl-alt-F10) to see if there were messages and sure enough after a while I saw: "hda1: lost interrupt" followed by something like 'drive not ready...bad block...'. Apart from these messages the system was dead. These messages appeared repeatedly until I rebooted. Repeated attempts to copy resulted in the same error but not always for the same device (sometimes hda sometimes hdb). In each case the system was totally dead though sometimes I could reboot alt+sysRQ+b. If my windows partition happened to be mounted at the time it was corrupt after the crash and needed reformatting (I've re-installed windows 4 times in the past 2 days), the linux partitions survived thanks to ext3.

Repeated tests with Knoppix (copying large directories back and forth between the partitions) causes no problems!!

I think SuSE's ide drivers (or kernel patches) are causing the problems but I haven't got clue what to do about it. By the way it makes no difference if X is running or not and the safe settings don't help either.

As long as the home on hda is not mounted the system seems stable. (it's my kid's computer and they play games for hours on end without problems) Though cfdisk now refuses to start because "the end of partition 2 is past the end of the disk". This was definitely corrupted during the crashes because I had no problems with the previously installed SuSE 7.3 and I did start cfdisk succesfully once after the first couple of freezes. I don't want to fix this yet because it probably won't cause problems until the partition gets pretty full.
Maybe the others in this list with freeze problems can verify my findings and maybe someone has a solution.

Thanks for taking the time to read all this.
Con

Re: Freezes and SuSE 8.1
 

This is the sort of thing that I would think that the kernel guys would be interested in.

FWIW, All of my freeze problems were Nvidia related, now solved (I'm using the standard SuSE Nvidia server).


John

I had partition touble once. You said somthing about partitions overlapping? I had that to. I used partition magic and it solved problem in an instant! I know partition magic is very expensive, and I don't know I thats the root of your problem. But if somone you know hase partition magic, you could give it a go.

System Freezes
 

I notice similar pheonmenon with my system. My system also has two disks. But I still can't figure out what really causes the system to crash.
Once it happens I can only use the had System Reset to restart it.

had a few freezes at first, seemed to be kde screensaver related, no problems since installing the latest kde patches with yast online update.

In the meantime I found one possible cuase: A removable disk drawer: This happens to make the total length of the IDE cable longer and it seems, the disk operation unreliable. As the BIOS is set to halt on all errors, this is what the computer did --> freeze.

Everthing works perfect for me.

So every things is okey now?

Nice job!


John