Hi

I am running Ubuntu linux on a Compaq N610c laptop. I use Windows XP as well on it during the day at work.

I had no problems, until I upgraded from Breezy to Dapper Drake. The machine will lock up intermittently. Sometimes I can work for hours, sometimes it will only hold for a few minutes.

Since I suspect the kernel to lock up (the system freezes completely, no CTRL-ALT-DEL, no console switching, no manipulations at all except for a hard reboot) I tried upgrading that one first. I used the Ubuntu standard build and went to 2.6.17.5. To summarize actions taken:

- upgrade to 2.6.17.5 (standard Dapper uses 2.6.15.23)
- run memtest86+ for a couple of hours
- upgrade complete distro to Edgy (Ubuntu development branch) to have most up to date packages possible
- reinstall Dapper from scratch (and used my internal IDE disk instead of the external USB disk I was using before)
- installed minimal Dapper (server install) with xterm

All this situations showed the same issue. It seems I am able to reproduce this faster, when I start VMware server. However, this one was not installed on all tests described above.

I could revert back to Breezy, but then some pkgs I like will not install due to unresolved dependencies (required versions are not backported).

The problem is, I don't see errors in de various logfiles found in /var/log. The only thing I think MIGHT be related are some messages about eth0 going to promiscuous mode. I noticed they happened at least a few times before a lock up.

My question, rather than expecting a magical solution, is how to troubleshoot this? I tried xconsole to see console messages, but there aren't any just before the lock up. Are there traces I can enable or something similar?

So far no real harm done, but yesterday I corrupted a virtual disk (vmware) due to the hard reboot, so I lost a virtual machine which I now have to reinstall completely. This is a pain, I am a linux advocate but this is not what I need. And especially, this already cost me tremendous amount of spare time I don't have

Thanks for reading this long story, any inputs would be highly appreciated!

hey, i had similar problems a week ago, i did a few things such as removing wifi drivers i wasn't using, doing a memtest, cleaning out the machine with compressed air, doing filesystem checks (reiserfsck, dosfsck) and i also disabled a paralell and serial port i wasn't using and told my bios not to reserve and irq for pci vga card (trying to free up irqs)

anyway i'm not sure which one of those did the trick, but it's been crash free for nearly a week

gl