Hello,

I have a Thinkpad t42 running debian etch and ubuntu hardy, sharing a home directory. Yesterday, a program (transcribe, compiled from source several months ago) crashed due to:

error: segmentation fault

Apt-get update resulted in:

segmentation faulty tree

which I fixed with:

sudo rm /var/cache/apt/*.bin

About an hour later the computer froze; I manually restarted. The mandatory file check on reboot found "unexpected inconsistencies", so I ran it manually:

umount /dev/hda1
fsck /dev/hda1

After an exceedingly large number of unclean inodes, I got this message:

WARNING: PROGRAMMING BUG IN E2FSCK!
OR SOME BONEHEAD (YOU) IS CHECKING A MOUNTED (LIVE) FILESYSTEM.

After a few more 'yes's on my part, I got some sort of kernel system call trace error, filling a page with details of the call trace and freezing the system, so that I was again forced to restart.

This time I tried booting into Ubuntu. The x-server failed to start, instead I got:

kernel panic: not syncing: fatal error in interrupt.

On restarting, I had similar fsck problems I'd had on the Debian side. AT one point I tried to reinstall kde, and got more segmentation faults.

At this point I turned to Knoppix, which booted, but refused to open any programs, citing segmentation faults, then froze.

I tried reinstalling Debian from the boot disk, but the disk kept freezing. After many tries I got to the "Installing Base hardware" step, which gave errors that files in the cdrom directory were corrupt, and finally ending with bootstrapping error. /var/log/syslog showed:

Error: Segmentation fault.

(I tried another Debian boot disk just to make sure it wasn't a cd problem: it wasn't).

So I still have the not working Ubuntu partition, as well as the freshly formatted Debian partition, but the computer is unable to go very long without freezing and keeps giving me segmentation faults. Help?

Hi,

A simple word of advice; Do not perform maintenance on active or mounted devices. You should perform filesystem maintenance while 'single' user mode. You can enter this by passing the 'single' parameter to the kernel. Or you can use a Livecd or install cd to perform this type of maintenance on your filesystem.

Thank you for the advice. As I had specifically unmounted the partition, (umount /dev/sda1) I did not consider it a mounted device. Moreover both Knoppix and the Debian install cd returned the same sort of errors when running fsck.

At the moment both Knoppix and the install cd consistently freeze within 5-10 minutes of starting (not enough time to do any useful maintenance). Do you have any other suggestions?

Hi,
You could be experiencing a memory problem. Run 'memtest86' that is on the Knoppix CD. Run for a long term. Overnight if possible. That is unless the fault shows in the first few passes.

Hello,

Thank you, I ran memtest and got eight digits of errors within an hour. I think I may have found the problem! I guess now I'll try switching out the ram sticks until I find a combination that doesn't give memtest errors. Thank you!

Hi,

Before you go changing memory try and clean the edge connector and the connector. Do a search here on LQ since I've posted several times on how to clean properly.

Thanks again for all of your help. I did have to change the memory in the end, but now everything is working beautifully: memtest ran for 15 hours with no problems, and both operating systems are back up and running!