Re: diagnosing hard-locks [was memtest+ won't load]

On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 02:24:12PM -0400, Michael Marsh wrote:
On 7/7/06, Andrew Sackville-West <andrew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 01:36:52PM -0400, Michael Marsh wrote:
I actually had a suspiciously similar problem recently. A couple of
times, everything just froze. The power button was the only thing
that would respond. memtest86+ showed no problems. I figured it
might be a bad block in swap, so I ran the START self-diagnostics on
the drive. The only effect that had was to do something bad to the
drive R/W head, reminding me that I really should be doing backups.
so IOW, don't do that? ;)

YMMV. I'm guessing it was a coincidence caused by the combination of
a 4-year-old drive and a heavy access pattern.

note to self, backup now.


I haven't been using start much, but it looks pretty okay to my
untrained eyes. The disks are old though. but again, it doesn't happen
in situations where i'd be swapping. blah. its frustrating. and
unpredictable which is probably the worst part.

I'm *always* swapping on my laptop (which sounds really bad out of
context), since my 256MB of RAM is taken up almost entirely by firefox
and thunderbird. And that's before loading any pages. Once I
resurrect the thing I'll pick up a SODIMM to boost the physical RAM,
which should also make it peppier.


definitely. what environment are you running in? my desktop using 256
megs rarely swaps. my usual setup is firefox, gnucash and mutt always
running. When I pull up openoffice I'll start swapping, but not always. all this run
under xfce, which seems pretty lightweight. I'd guess you're using
gnome or kde? or is tbird really that big? regardless, you might find
a lighterweight desktop is helpful on that laptop.

A

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Digital signature