Re: Spontaneous unclean reboots

On 2008-09-21, Stefan Patric <not@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I would still fsck / just to make sure there are no errors, etc.
Thoroughness does have its advantages.

I'm going to do that from the Knoppix cd I have, although I'm not sure
how to do it? Do I chroot into the partition, then run fsck?

Basically, I think the problem is Opera and not your system, X server
or otherwise. Your system ran okay until you started Opera, right?
Did you run a checksum on the Opera download before installing it?
Have you updated/upgraded your Etch install, so that it has the most
current libraries, kernel, etc?

I wish it was only Opera. The system has crashed three times today, or
maybe four, I'm losing count.

At the console (without X running), I ran

memtest 128m --log (maybe a dumb move, as I only have 128mb of ram)

and the system rebooted uncleanly.

In X, I was running Firefox (Iceweasel) and the system rebooted uncleanly.

I did some work on the machine--cleaned all the dust out of it, took out
the winmodem that I don't use, went into the bios and disabled the
parallel port and 1 serial port that I don't use, reseated nvidia
geforce graphics card and jiggled wires.

Then I booted the machine, started X, played some bzflag, ate dinner,
and when I came back I saw the login prompt, but this time the system had
rebooted *cleanly*, while I was away eating. At 20:14. Strange.

einstein:/home/curty# last
curty tty2 Sun Sep 21 20:33 still logged in
curty tty1 Sun Sep 21 20:19 still logged in
reboot system boot 2.6.18-4-686 Sun Sep 21 20:14 - 20:36 (00:22)
curty tty1 Sun Sep 21 18:38 - crash (01:35)
reboot system boot 2.6.18-4-686 Sun Sep 21 18:38 - 20:36 (01:58)
curty tty1 Sun Sep 21 18:26 - crash (00:11)

The locate data base is updated by a cron job at 20:10. I don't know, I
don't understand this "last" output which shows two crashes at 18:26 and
18:38. I don't remember two within an eight minute interval. I don't
get it.


I didn't checksum the Opera deb (yes, bad form, I know). Debian Etch
(stable) only gets security updates. I'm up to date.

Well, if you still have the .deb archive, checksum it. If not, don't use
Opera until you've eliminated as many of the other possible causes to
your reboot problem, then run Opera and see if the same thing happens.
If it does, uninstall it and reinstall from a new download, and see if
the reboots still occur.

I don't care about Opera. I'll just uninstall it (and purge its config
files), then if I ever want to install it again I'll download a fresh
deb and checksum it first like a good boy.

Problems like this sometimes take weeks or months to solve and rectify.
Just eliminate each possible problem one by one.

So far, I don't seem to be making any progress and things are
deteriorating, as in "getting worse."

Have you check to see if the kernel was or is damaged. Or just install
one whose checksum is good. Of course, you could have corrupted
libraries, etc. or your hard drive could be slowly failing, which is a
good possibility, if the hard drive like the system is 7 years old.

It's the same stock debian kernel 2.6.18-4-686. I don't know why I got
a kernel panic. I don't know how I'd check for corrupted libraries,
either. smartctl finds nothing wrong with my hard drive.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Spontaneous unclean reboots
    ... You need to boot with any Linux liveCD, so system's / partition will ... not be mounted or in use, and run fsck on it. ... Did you run a checksum on the Opera download before installing it? ...
    (alt.os.linux)
  • Spontaneous unclean reboots
    ... It started happening in X, with the Opera browser, the other day. ... the file systems uncleanly unmounted. ... Then, in the rebooting process, because ... After this reboot fsck would proceed to ...
    (alt.os.linux)
  • Re: Some other ubuntu questions/comments
    ... loads up it still lists all of them and their recovery modes as ... I think you mean Grub not Gimp (Gnu Image ... what I did but Opera seems to do nearly 99% of what I want to do. ... If you mean losing disk space, kernel images are quite large compared ...
    (Ubuntu)
  • SLowing Down with kernel 2.6.12-1.1372_FC3
    ... Has anyone else experinced that Firefox slows down with the ... 2.6.12-1.1372_FC3 kernel? ... In Opera things are working fine and fast, is this a bug, or is it something ...
    (Fedora)
  • Re: Can not install opera 7.50 via apt-get
    ... Beta means stuff is still broken. ... > c'mon, its Opera, not a kernel:) ... > Pozdrawiam. ... Its been discussed in the Opera newsgroups and everyone agrees its not ...
    (alt.os.linux.suse)