Hello all

Well i was watching an avi with "gmplayer zeropoint.avi" from a
terminal. About 30 minutes into it, it started freezing and then catching
up, so i quit a few other programs i had running. Everything was fine
again for about another 30 minutes, and then a hard crash, wasn't able to
kill X (ctrl alt bkspace), no ctrl-alt-del, nothing, was forced to hit the
reset button. When my computer crashed, the top half of my 19" monitor
was black with some misc "video noise", and the bottom half was the X "herring-bone" pattern.
After I rebooted, my computer would hang during hotplug. I shutdown
and restarted with "Slack2.4.26 -nohotplug" from lilo. (thats a
recompiled 2.4.26 that has been working fine since end of June begining
of July) and i booted sucessfully. When i tried to startx black screen
and hard lock, had to use reset button again. I rebooted again (with no
hotplug) and checked /var/log/messages and around the time of the first
crash there is a whole bunch of garbage like @'s with a block background
and other misc crap. I looked at all of the other logs in /var/log and
see nothing to diagnose what the problem may be. I;ve seen this garbage
in /var/log/messages before, but it was never a problem. I just
remembered I didn't check dmsg :/
Another thing to mention is that I've also had trouble with slack
hanging at hotplug, but usually 1 or 2 reboots and or giving it enough
time i usually get a sucessful boot. I went to bad at 2:30am and gave
hotplug untill i got up at 10:00am and still no boot. I'm at a loss at what to do now. I'm posting this from windows :/

SysSpecs;
Slackware 10 with all patches (save vim)
kernel 2.4.26 recompiled with pretty much only correct arch and "special
command" for my onboard promise controller
AMD XP2800+
MSI KT3 ULTRA ARU
GeForce 4 TI4600 (nvidia drivers can't remember version off hand, latest
at time of install around end of June)
SoundBlaster Audigy2 ZS (using alsa)

My system has been slack stable up untill this point. Please let me know
any other info that is needed

PS about 2 mos ago i had a dieing hard drive, and tested my memory extensively and both 512mb sticks passed and are 100% and I have a PC Power and Cooling 420 watt PSU

So can you still boot using -nohotplug?
If so, does it works fine when not using X?

By the way, do you have a spare computer? If you have one, when X hangs try sshing into your machine, it happened me some times that X crashed and wouldn't accept any input so i couldn't ctrl+alt+backspace, but i could ssh from my spare pc and kill all.

correct, i can still boot fine with -nohotplug. I didn't try ssh'ing in from my other box, still getting used to have another computer on the network.

So any idea's on where to begin trouble shooting/fixing this?

It seems to be some video related driver as it hangs up firing X.
Let's start debugging it, first check /var/log/messages for string "hotplug", it should be there. But before doing that, run with your "bad" kernel to be sure that the log is recent. Look for that string and you'll see something like:
logger: /etc/rc.d/rc.hotplug start (entering script)
the hotplug stuff gets loaded here and ends here:
logger: /etc/rc.d/rc.hotplug start (exiting script)
Then run with -nohotplug and try to see if yo usee that log.

It could also be a bad connection between a card and the mobo.
( strange messages ) .Maybe just unplug and replug the card('s).
I think a real crash is mostly HW-related ( well... maybe just in my case )

egag

ok I suceffully rebooted into slack. No problems with hotplug this time around. I went back through /var/log/messages and this was the error right before the crash, and consequently right before the gobbley gook in the log.

Sep 12 02:10:01 lestat kernel: __alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed (gfp=0x1d2/0)

I haven't googled for anything about it yet. Thanks for the replies