Today I had a power outage which caused my computer to shutdown. Luckily I have a nice APC UPS which keeps my computer and network gear running for about 45 minutes. I'm running apcupsd to cleanly shutdown the system when the battery gets low.

So I get home pretty late and power the system back up. Everything looks normal, fsck did not run, so I knew the system had unmounted and sync'd the disks. I logged in and ran startx as normal.

After running startx, my computer froze at the NVIDIA splash screen. I tried ctrl+alt+backspace and nothing happened. I tried switching to another virtual terminal with ctrl+alt+f2, and nothing happened. Getting desperate, I tried the magic syskey REISUB, which is a series of alt+sysreq+r, alt+sysreq+e, .... , alt-sysreq+b. My computer did not respond to any of these except the last, which reboots the computer.

After the system was back up, I tried the following with no luck:
*installed the newest nvidia drivers
*using the nv xorg driver
*creating a new user with a clean /home
*reinstalling the latest slackware 12.1 xorg patches
*switching to different window managers

Everything I tried gave me the same result: A completely locked up system. The log files were no help because they were BLANK!

I rebooted with an older Slax CD in the drive, and x worked perfectly, so I don't think it's my hardware. Everything else seems to be running as usual. No weird messages in the logs and no good reason why this started happening.

I would like to avoid doing a reinstall because of the amount of time required to get everything back the way I like it. I considered reinstalling xorg completely, but I'm not sure what packages I need to remove. I'm pretty frustrated at this point, so I'm going to bed.

Any advice on what my next steps should be?


Thanks!
Grant

First thing I would do is boot up again with slax and force a fsck at least in /

The problem is most likely in your xorg.conf file. I would start by removing that proprietary nvidia driver completely. Then I'd backup your current xorg.conf file and recreate it from scratch using either X -configure or xorgsetup. If that doesn't fix your problem, check to see if you installed a new kernel, set it up as the default in LILO, but never rebooted into it until the power outage forced such a reboot.

In your xorg.conf, check your horizontal and vertical refresh rates as well as your screen resolution and make sure they are set to some failsafe defaults.

HTH

Definitely not my xorg.conf.


However, fsck reveals some dirty files:

root@slax:~# fsck.jfs -f /dev/sda3
fsck.jfs version 1.1.11, 05-Jun-2006
processing started: 10/31/2008 22.4.21
The current device is: /dev/sda3
Block size in bytes: 4096
Filesystem size in blocks: 4393777
**Phase 0 - Replay Journal Log
**Phase 1 - Check Blocks, Files/Directories, and Directory Entries
**Phase 2 - Count links
Incorrect link counts have been detected. Will correct.
**Phase 3 - Duplicate Block Rescan and Directory Connectedness
**Phase 4 - Report Problems
File system object FF216286 is linked as: /var/log/wtmp
cannot repair the data format error(s) in this file.
cannot repair FF216286. Will release.
File system object DF255104 is linked as: /var/tmp/kdecache-grant/http/a
cannot repair the data format error(s) in this directory.
cannot repair DF255104. Will release.
File system object DF348194 is linked as: /var/tmp/kdecache-grant/http/e
cannot repair the data format error(s) in this directory.
cannot repair DF348194. Will release.
File system object DF419157 is linked as: /var/tmp/kdecache-grant/http/g
cannot repair the data format error(s) in this directory.
cannot repair DF419157. Will release.
File system object DF419424 is linked as: /var/tmp/kdecache-grant/http
**Phase 5 - Check Connectivity
**Phase 6 - Perform Approved Corrections
71 files reconnected to /lost+found/.
**Phase 7 - Rebuild File/Directory Allocation Maps
**Phase 8 - Rebuild Disk Allocation Maps
17575108 kilobytes total disk space.
101986 kilobytes in 27277 directories.
9404264 kilobytes in 369064 user files.
124 kilobytes in extended attributes
256762 kilobytes reserved for system use.
8015944 kilobytes are available for use.
Filesystem is clean.

Ok, so after fixing the filesystem with fsck, the problem persists.

Any other ideas?

Maybe delete all files in /tmp and /var/tmp, reboot and see if you can startx ?

Deleted the files in /tmp and /var/tmp... still freezing.

I have had problems with ~/.Xauthority some times under other circumstances than yours, but on my laptop this error results usually in X just dying and getting me back to the console. It might be worth a shot though to delete it, it gets recreated next time you start your X server.

I thought about a bad user config file too, but:
That does not leave a lot of option...
Maybe a next step would be run X in debuger session

I tried running sh -x /usr/bin/startx &> /tmp/startx.log which resulted in an empty file being created.

Also, removing the .Xauthority file did not work.


Is it possible that I have corrupted X binaries?

(slackware 12.1 w/ all recent patches)
root@slax:/mnt/sda3/usr/bin# md5sum /mnt/sda3/usr/bin/X
461eec8e6bfca47e242aec66dd37785a /mnt/sda3/usr/bin/X

root@slax:/mnt/sda3/usr/bin# md5sum xinit
4badd338131cdbc714e64e2e1b45557c xinit

The md5sums match what I have on another (working) slackware box.

Is the above command the proper way to debug X ?

I don't have any patches for X - just the default 12.1 packages afaik

root@DarkerStar(/home/dive) md5sum /usr/bin/X
bdce5cc27df0d9ca5abc31b5177bc61d /usr/bin/X
root@DarkerStar(/home/dive) md5sum /usr/bin/xinit
4badd338131cdbc714e64e2e1b45557c /usr/bin/xinit

Are you sure your /tmp dir is empty ?
(ls -a /tmp to check for hidden files)
Maybe try:
strace startx 2> /tmp/Xerrors
Then check messages in /tmp/Xerrors file, see if there are obvious errors

Yup, I cleared my /tmp directory again, cleared .Xauthority*, .serverauth*, and ran strace startx 2> /tmp/Xerrors.

It produced an empty Xerrors file.

Ok, I finally made some freakin' progress.

It seems like the problem is with KDE because switching to a different window manager is now working.

I'm also getting an error:
/usr/lib/libGLcore.so.1: invalid ELF header