Re: Spontaneous unclean reboots

Curt wrote:
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?

No, you shouldn't have a file system mounted when you run fsck, so you just boot and run the fsck, without touching anything else.


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.

I suggest you take a look at your hardware before you do anything else, to lessen the risk of corrupting your file system further, you should not boot into your system.


At the console (without X running), I ran memtest 128m --log (maybe a dumb move, as I only have 128mb of ram)

You should use the memtest that you boot into, not using a tool that run as an application, as you want to be able to test the whole memory, otherwise you have to keep the kernel part of the memory out of the test and you won't see if there is anything wrong in that part, if you don't exclude the kernels memory space, then you will automatically crash wne you get to that point.

Many distributions do include memtest as a boot option on the install media (CD/DVD).


Your system starts to be really unstable, you should really try another PSU and run smart tools from a CD (just in case your system files has got corrupted).



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

You need to do more than just vacuum your case, I do suggest you concentrate on the PSU, the memory and the hard drive at first point, when you for sure can eliminate those as the cause, then move on other things like software.


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.

Did you run the long test? or just the short one?
The shorter one isn't finding all problems, but if you did the longer one, then you only have two things more to verify (which are simple to do so), memory and PSU.

For checking files, if they are damaged or not, you can run

debsums -cs


--

//Aho
.

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