[PLUG] Forced fsck

[Jason R. Martin]

On 5/9/06, John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 09 May 2006 11:34:44 -0700
> m0gely <m0gely at telestream.com> dijo:
>
> > Timothy J. Bruce wrote:
> >
> > > Can you use <Ctrl><F1> (I think that's the keystroke) to get a CLI login?
> > > If you can / do, you could log in and kill X and force it to restart.
> >
> > Or possibly ctrl+alt+back space while in X?  That's the three finger
> > solute for X and will kill it.
>
> Everone seems to have missed a tidbit in what I said earlier. When it
> locks up, the keyboard and mouse are BOTH dead. So Ctrl-this and
> Alt-that ain't gonna happen. The only button that still works is the
> power button.
>
> It would be nice to figure out what is causing it, but from my
> experience it is pretty random, with one possible exception: Kdar will
> lock things up about one backup out of three. Normally I don't back up
> my mp3s because I keep them in a separate folder outside of /home, plus
> I have them all copied to my Windows computer as well, but once when I
> did Kdar locked up, and again on the second attempt. There are about 14
> GB of them. This leads me to believe it might be a USB problem, since
> the backups are going to the pocket drive on USB. Otherwise, the
> lockups seem to be random, although, as Keith points out, I do have an
> external USB mouse. So if there is something flaky going on with USB,
> that could account for the rest of the lockups.
>
> I have always enjoyed the fact that my external USB mouse "just works."
> I can boot the computer completely without plugging it in, and when I
> do, it instantly works. I can unplug it, plug it back in, and it works.
> It's just perfectly hot-swappable. The touchpad has an on-off button
> which I normally leave off because I hate it. But if I turn it on the
> touchpad immediately starts to work too, whether it was on when I
> booted the computer or not. I can have both working at the same time if
> I want to, although normally I use just the external mouse. The
> touchpad is just for situations where I get to the university and
> discover that I left the external mouse sitting at home on the desk.
> Because both work so perfectly it's hard to believe that either is the
> cause of the lockups.
>
> As for video drivers, originally I used the open source video drivers.
> They ran just fine except that I was never able to get a DVD to play.
> Then one day several months ago I learned how to install the
> proprietary nVidia drivers. That fixed the DVD problem. However, it
> locked up before and continues to lock up afterwards, with about the
> same frequency, so I doubt the nVidia drivers had anything to do with
> it. The nVidia proprietary drivers not only permit playing DVDs, but
> the screen refresh is faster, so I want to keep them -- unless, of
> course, I eventually discover that they are the source of the problem.

If the keyboard and mouse are completely locked up (CTL-ALT-Backspace
doesn't work to kill X, etc.) then it sounds more like a kernel panic.
 Are your keyboard LEDs blinking (caps lock LED for example)?

Jason