shutdown "trying to free nonexistent resource"

[Guest unperplex]

I'm running into a very frustrating error which happens every single time I shutdown my computer. The list of services being shut down scrolls along until it gets to this one:

"Stopping pcmcia: Trying to free nonexistent resource <000002f8-000002ff>" at which point the machine hangs. Mysteriously, the fan also kicks in everytime I reach this point. I always have to power-down the computer to get past this, meaning I have to do a filesystem integrity check on boot up.

 

I've got a Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop with a generic linksys card. Everything boots up just fine; my network connection through the card is perfect. It's just this weird error on shutdown.

 

I was thinking that maybe I could bypass the error by shuting down or killing some service before I shutdown mandrake; but I'm not sure what service that might be.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated; I'm stumped!

[adamw]

service pcmcia stop

 

(as root)

[Guest unperplex]

Thanks for the quick reply. Frustratingly, that didn't work.

 

When I stopped the service as root, I got this error message:

ERROR: module ds is in use by serial_cs, pcnet_cs

ERROR: Module pcmcia_core is in use by serial_cs, pcnet_cs, yenta_socket.

 

After prinitng this, the system froze and wouldn't repsond to any user input. (Even trying to kill the X server) I actually had to turn off the power to break out of whatever death loop it was caught in!

 

What's going on here? I thought Linux wasn't supposed to just freeze and die? Obviously I'm doing something wrong...is there a sequence of services I need to shut down? And is there some special trick to unfreezing a frozen linux box?

[adamw]

Alt-SysRq-R , Alt-SysRq-E, Alt-SysRq-I (and then if it's still snuffed it, Alt-SysRq-U, Alt-SysRq-S, Alt-SysRq-B). Now you know what the SysRq key is for! :)

 

That is a bit odd, though. Linux certainly can just freeze and die, and it's almost always caused by a hardware-related problem like this. You might want to play with any BIOS options you can find related to PCMCIA (and there's the old make sure PNP OS is disabled, of course). Here's an interesting titbit I found via Google:

 

1) Edit your /etc/pcmcia/config.opts and change the "include port" line to read as follows:

include port 0x100-0x4ff, port 0xc00-0xcff

(i.e.: remove the range 0x800-0x8ff). This should cause the lock-up to go away. (Thanks to Marc Swanson for this one)

 

I'm not sure if we actually use the config.opts file, I know our pcmcia configuration stuff is a little (cough) customised. I'll make a note to myself to check this out when I'm back home with my Linux laptop, but it definitely looks like a hardware buglet to me, something we might be able to fix with obscure options like these.

[Guest unperplex]

I really do appreciate the help, since I'm a bit clueless when it comes to pcmcia driver software.

 

I didn't have much luck with the config suggestion, as my config.opts already had the setting you suggested. I double checked it, but that port is definitely excluded. Drat.

 

The magic keystrokes were very cool, and did seem to at least break the box out of the hang state it was stuck in. The frustrating thing is, that these repeated forced shutdowns are steadily corrupting the disk. Even when I use the keys you suggested, I still get an "unclean shutdown error" when I reboot, and each time get shunted into e2fsck, which keeps finding more and more bad blocks. I'm starting to feel as though I've only got a little time left before using linux completely ruins my computer.

 

I couln't find any relelvant BIOS settings in the dell bios ui either - nothing that seems to reference pcmcia at all.

 

The other unnerving thing is that if I leave the system up too long, the filesystem mysteriously becomes read only! I'll come back and suddenly firefox and vim won't work, because my /home/.kde directory is no longer writable. I've got no clue why this happens; and the only fix is to reboot, which means I lose a few more blocks.

 

Any help you could offer would be greatly appreciated. I really don't want to have to go back to windows!

[adamw]

Well, no amount of dodgy shutdowns can cause unrecoverable (i.e. physical) damage to a disk, so if there are really bad _blocks_ on the disk (and not just a corrupt filesystem), you have much deeper problems. If you're using ext2, the first thing I'd suggest is stop using it and start using ext3. If you're using ext3, don't use the ext2 check at boot.

[Guest tom4711]

to unperplex:

 

Did you find a solution ?

 

I have a similar problem on an IBM Thinkpad 600E. Always hangs up during shutdown with a "trying to free nonexistent resource" during pcmcia shutdown.

Running MDK 10.1. Official Download.

 

Thanks,

Thomas