Starting a couple days ago, I came back to my computer and the screen was black, and it was completely frozen. I reset it, and when it was booting it got to where it remounts / as read/write, and just hung there. Using a knoppix CD, I ran fsck.reiserfs on it, which found a couple problems. I had to run it again with a certain option (i dont remember which one) so that it would basically rebuild everything. 8 hours later this was done, and I was able to boot it up as normal. Then, that same day but sevceral hours later, I was watching a movie when it just froze. Same problem again. If anyone can even guess what might be causing this, please reply. I don't think its the physical disk that is messed up, although if you do, then let me know. I plan to copy everything to another drive, format this one with ext3 this time, and then copy everything back. Hopefully this will fix it, but please let me know what you think.

Unfortunately I didnt think to write down whatever fsck told me, so I dont have that information right now. Since this will probably happen again, I can get it later.

Doesn't sound to me like your filesystem but your hard drive starting to go. If you fixed it once by reformatting and it did the same thing again the next day, certainly a possibility. I'd suggest at this time, backup any data you can get off of it.. wipe it fully and start from scratch. And possibly during the install, do a check for bad blocks during the formatting stage.

if it makes a difference, this is a Gentoo system, and this problem began after doing an "emerge -uD world". Not immediately after, but either during the night afterwards or the morning afterwards. This drive is only about 5 or 6 months old, so I dont want to believe that it is going bad, but that might be the case. Anything else that could be causing it?


thanks

my system has been running fine for several days now. I want to test to see if the problem has anythign to do with using 3ddesktop (a cool program using openGL to switch workspaces in 3d). The filesystem became messed up the day I started using this program. After the second time it happened, I decided to try not using it. I haven't had a problem since then. I dont see how this could have caused it, and havent found anyone else mentioning similar problems, but I would like to find out. I like using it enough that I would like to try using it again to see if my system crashes once again, but first I would like to hear any comments whether or not it is possible for this to be the problem.

thanks