Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 65019
Sudden and total crash of system; racing hard disks
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:42:36 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.9) Gecko/20020408 Description of problem: The system (a clean install of RH 7.3 on a freshly wiped hard disk) will suddenly freeze; no screen display (X or console); no response to keyboard; no response to remote logins (laptop directly plugged into ethernet port). Reset button no use; full hardware reset required. At first this happened occasionaly during normal operation (KDE 3 desktop), or even during final stages of KDE startup; there are no traces of any error, kernel panic, X-server crash in /var/log/messages or /var/log/XFree86.log. I then (more or less randomly) decided to rebuild kdebase from RH source rpm, hoping that it might be due to KDE and this might solve it. This crashed the system again. Then booted to runlevel 3, tried to rpm --rebuild kdebase-3.0.0-12.src.rpm from console, and the system again (twice in row now) crashed at some point during the compilation. I have no idea what this could be related to. The system previously ran 6.2, 7.0, 7.1 and 7.2. Decided to make a fresh start with 7.3 (hence wiped disks) and have had no luck... Don't know which logs you might be interested in, or how I could increase verbosity of messages in /var/log/messages as there is nothing useful in there at the moment. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.rpm --rebuild kdebase-3.0.0-12.src.rpm 2.sit back and wait :( 3. Actual Results: The system completely freezes up, screen goes blank, no remote login pssible. System log contains no reference to any errors. Expected Results: Command completes -- successfully or unsuccessfully! Additional info:
do you have flashing keyboard lights when this happens?
Just crashed the system again to make sure: no, the keyboard lights are dead, too.
Just an update: I can still crash the system by running rpm --rebuild on XFree86, kde-base, you name it. A previously not noticed problem is now that the mouse occasionally starts jumping across the screen and activates random windows. After that, windows can no longer be moved or resized, and the marching ants selection in gimp is similarly affected (it happened while I was editing a large image file). Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I've been browsing the comp.os.linux.redhat newsgroup and come across other people with similar random lockups, all of whom suspect hardware faults: graphics card (mine is a matrox mg200), sound (soundblaster live!) or bad memory. Could you make any recommendations as to how I can isolate the source of my problem?
Hello, I think this bug can be removed from bugzilla... After extensive checking (with memtest86 for memory and piece-by-piece replacement of suspected hardwared it turned out it was a motherboard fault, of all things... RH7.3 now happily running on new system.