Hi, I'm running Enlightenment on Fedora 16 and I'm experiencing freezes sometimes where the mouse becomes very laggy and system is completely unresponsive. It stays that way for ten mins. I experienced a freeze today and thought I would post from the logs here if anyone can tell me why the freezes are happening.

I copied these logs after the freeze as someone had told me before that it might be helpful to trace the root of the problem from these files. I'm fairly new to linux, but I hope someone can tell me how to resolve the freezing issue.

Attached Files

	dmesg.txt (27.0 KB, 13 views)
	xsession-errors.txt (79.1 KB, 5 views)
	xorg.0.log.txt (127.9 KB, 5 views)

It seems that one of your disks has problems. Download the manufacturer's diagnosis tool and test your disk.

Hi TobiSGD. My hard disk is a very old Samsung drive, though the rest of the computer is quite new. Do you mean that the disk might be failing? I will search for the diagnosis tool but meanwhile I ran fsck and the partitions came out clean except I could not run it on /dev/sda3. So I fdisk -l'd and there does seem to be something wrong with the partition set up. It seems /dev/sda3 and /dev/sda5 are overlapping.

Do you think that could be causing the errors in the logs or is that issue something else? I'm not sure how to proceed next. Is there a non-destructive way to resolve this? And if not, how would I backup one of my partitions first? I have a very important archbang install on sda5. If I use dd to dump that partition to a usb drive, then format the hard disk, and use dd again to dump the partition back from the usb drive, would that be best or is formatting unnecessary? Also, would there be any problems using dd because the hard-drive partition size is bigger than the usb? Thanks for your help

There is nothing wrong with your partitioning, also that you couldn't fsck sda3 is normal. An extended partition, in your case sda3, is nothing more than a container for logical partitions (sda5 in your case), hence the overlapping. Nothing wrong with that, it is just a way to overcome limitations with the old-style partition tables (inherited from DOS).
If your Arch install is important to you then you should have a backup anyways, regardless if the machine misbehaves or not. Making a backup when there are issues is like fastening the seatbelt after you crashed into a wall.

Since Samsung has sold it's harddisk business to Seagate the appropriate tool for testing Samsung disks is Seatools: http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/
Choose the DOS version and click on any Windows version in the drop-down-list, the OS question is meaningless here. This way you get a bootable iso-file.

Hi,

I didn't have a blank CDR yesterday so I ran smartctl's long test and that test came out fine. Today, I ran the SeaTools "Long Test" and it said that there was a bad sector that it was unsuccessful in repairing and the long test failed.
the results were:
Short DST = Passed
Long Test = Failed
and it told me to read the log. The log didn't have any other information, just that Long Test failed. I read on a website that if SeaTools throws up any error, I should get my drive replaced. Also, SeaTools recognized the disk as being from an unknown manufacturer. So - does my drive has a permanent issue and it must be replaced?

Modern drives with their enormous capacities sometimes have bad sectors. For this reason the drives have a spare area to "replace" bad sectors with working ones. This is done by the disks controller transparently, the user doesn't notice it. When Seatools comes up with bad sectors this means that the controller ran out of spare sectors, so that it couldn't replace the ones found by the diagnosis tools.
This is most of the time a symptom of a dying disk. I would recommend to replace that disk.