RHEL 4 Locking up on Compaq nx7400 laptop
 

Please help!! I have just bought a brand new HP/Compaq nx7400 laptop running RHEL 4 and when I unplug the power to run on battery it just craps out. This happens every time when the power state changes - from battery to wall or from wall to battery.

I have tried to add in "acpi=off noacpi" in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file, but when I updated the newest release of the kernel, I was back to square one.

Any suggestions??

Much thanks in advance!

Why did you add the two switches acpi=off and noapci??? With most modem laptops the use of acpi with the acpid daemon running is a good idea.

Remove the two switches (on the new kernel at least temporally) and if need be install the acpid rpm package plus disable apm.

Lenard, thanks for the reply! The switches were added as suggested by a RH engineer and seemed to have work where the system was not locking up. The kernel release was 2.6.9-42.0.8. However, when I updated the kernel to 2.6.9-42.0.10, I was back to the same issue - system locks up.

Just to test if it's an issue with the kernel or not, I unplugged the power before the kernel boot and after. It seems the system would lock up when the kernel was booting. And I am also not able to ping the machine when it freezes.

Any thoughts?

Thanks again!

Thoughts in no certain order........

Check for a BIOS update, the laptop should not freeze when the AC adapter is unplugged or inserted.

You could wait until the 14th also (rumor has it that's when RHEL5 will be released) then try upgrading.

You could build your own custom kernel, support for newer hardware is not that great in the RHEL-4 kernel family. Which is not unexpected as Red Hat aims for stability and not towards leading/bleeding edge.

HP is fairly good at Linux support, you might want to check if they have support for RHEL-4u4 for your laptop.

A complicated process but might help :

Try using SysRq M, P, t when systme locaks up. This will log the system state when it locks up in /var/log/messages. To enable sysrq run below command :

# echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq

Looking at messages file might help but its really hard to read this info.