Mandrake Locking Up Hard at Random

[Guest JerryJerr]

Hello All. To the designers and moderators of this board first:

 

Thank you so much for this wonderful and informative site. It's so helpful to a newbie like myself. On with my problem I'm having.

 

At random, I could be doing anything and it can be 2 minutes after I get to the desktop, or 20 minutes, or 2 hours.

My machine just locks up. Can't do anything. Frozen. I'm not doing any certain task. I could be just surfing the web, listening to a MP3 in Kaboodle, watching a music Video in Xine or watching a movie in Mplayer, or just following along with a tutorial on Mandrake. Everything will just freeze up.

 

I realize this is very vague, but that's all I can offer at the moment.

 

When I lock up I have no control with the keyboard. Attempted a CTR-ALT-F2. No Go. I have to just power down from the towers reset button.

 

Up until today, after I reboot back into Mandrake, everything was working find until It would lockup again.

 

This last time I was able to go 2 hours without this lockup. However, after I rebooted , I had no sound.

 

Should I just go with the current configuration and wait until 9.2 is released and hope that whatever is causing this random lockup problem will be fixed in that upgrade?

 

Or does anyone else have a suggestion?

 

Thank you.

 

AMD Athlon XP 2500

512 PC 2700 RAM

GeForceFX5600 Video Card

IBM 7200rpm 120 Gig Hard drive

Leadtek WinFast TV

Creative Sound Blaster Live

Dual Boot/Windows XP Home/Mandrake 9.1

using Lilo as the boot manager

[Guest anon]

Welcome to the board.

Found this for you, it may help:

  choicebox : 10/04 08:27 : Incident created

Hi,

 

I'm asking for advice on troubleshooting a particular issue.

 

I've installed MDK 9.1 on my PC. I can use it for hours at a time and never any problem with crashes or anything like that.

 

If I leave the PC for say 30 mins and then come back to it, the machine has locked up solid. Pressing Num Lock doesn't toggle the light on the keyboard or anything. CTRL ALT DEL and CTRL ALT BACKSPACE have no effect.

 

I am confident that the problem isn't overheating. The CPU isn't too hot and leaving the side of the case off doesn't help. It doesn't feel warm inside the case either. I am also confident that it is not a hardware issue.

 

When 9.1 1st came out I quickly installed using the default settings on this same PC and ran it for several days. I never saw the lockups then.

 

Over the w/e I formatted the HDD and made a nice custom install (choosing only the apps I want). Everything's working fine as long as I use the PC. When I walk away & leave it alone it locks up.

 

I think it might be related to using the NVIDIA driver for my Riva TNT2. I'm going to change back to the old 'nv' module and test.

 

Suppose that this doesn't make any difference, what should be my next steps for trying to get to the bottom of this?

 

Thanks in advance

 

Poider

 

 

           

 

Navy : 10/04 07:25 : Reply received

Hi,

I read somewhere that there are known issues with "nvidia" driver and using

"nv" driver instead seems to be the workaround

 

 

     

 

Navy : 10/04 09:51 : Reply received

Hi,

It could be related to APM ( power management ) settings.

Check it in Mandrake control center.

 

 

                 

 

decampsr : 11/04 07:39 : Reply received

The nvidia driver can appear to be unstable if you are using AGP. In my

/etc/X11/XF86config-4 I have

Section "Device"

Identifier "NVIDIA GeForce2 MX"

VendorName "Guillemot"

BoardName "NVIDIA GeForce2 DDR (generic)"

Driver "nvidia" # nvidia

Option "DPMS" "power_saver"

Option "NvAGP" "0"

Option "NoLogo" "on"

#Option "HWCursor off "

#Option "SWCursor on"

EndSection

 

But I guess that AGP problems occur when X displays too many things, not when

you're away from the computer.

 

So maybe, you should change ther DPMS option instead. This "30 minutes" really

sounds like a power management problem. Is it always the same amount of time?

 

Don't you have relevant info in /var/log/messages or /var/log/dmesg ?

 

And I think you can solve your offset problem using the Modeline parameters of

XF86Config-4 (man XF86Config)

 

You should really use the nvidia driver: it is much faster. The nv driver is

does NOT support hardware acceleration for 3D...

 

-- Regis

 

 

               

 

choicebox : 11/04 06:34 : More info provided

Hello again Navy,

 

I tried another TNT-chipset card this afternoon. That also locks up when used with the Nvidia driver.

 

The only reason I want to change drivers is because the nv driver doesn't fill the screen properly - it is offset. There's 6mm or so of black on the left hand side of the display and the right hand side is not visible.

 

When I use the nvidia driver it's perfectly centred. This monitor is an LCD screen showing the display for 2 PCs - one windows, one MDK. I am using a 2-port KVM to swap between the two.

 

On my monitor, if I adjust it so that the nv driver's image is centred, the windows display is off-centred.

 

I did hear come across a util to alter the image size 'inittune' or similar.

That made things a bit better but not as good as the nvidia driver :-(

 

Any more practical ideas to try? I might be able to find a non-NVIDIA AGP card but that's cheating!

 

Peter

 

 

         

 

choicebox : 10/04 04:49 : More info provided

Good idea. The only Power Saving part I saw was for powering down the monitor.

 

I changed the settings so that only the suspecd part kicks in - the other 2 powersaving modes are disabled. That made no difference.

 

Is this the part that you were referring to?

 

After I posted yesterday night, I changed the driver back to the old 'nv' module and it was fine - no luckups.

 

I've now changed it back to the 'nvidia' module but added a little case fan blowing directly over the GPU heatsink (it doesn't have a fan of its own)

 

Not sure how an overheating GPU could lock up the whole OS tho'

 

Thanks for your help - I'll see if there's anything in the BIOS about power saving too.

 

Poider

 

 

   

 

choicebox : 12/04 07:20 : Incident closed

Thanks Navy and Decampsr,

 

There wasn't anything helpful in the var/log but the extract of XF86Config-4 and general DPMS diagnosis put me on the right track.

 

I did some Google searching for XFree options and other ppl's configs.

I changed Option "dpms" in the driver section to be Option "dpms" "on"

and added Option "dpms" to the monitor section.

 

Now it's all working fine so huge thanks to you both for the help.

 

Poider

[Glitz]

Just out of curiosity, does it by any chance also lock up when you're running windows?

 

Glitz.

[Guest JerryJerr]

I'm not having any lockup problems on the XP side. XP is very stable.

 

I'm starting to keep a log.

 

Booted into Mandrake at 1:33 PM today and it locked at 2:40

Rebooted into Mandrake at 2:43 and it locked at 3:09

 

When I restarted I chose GNOME as my GUI instead of KDE, to see if it could be a GUI problem. That was a mistake. I couldn't get my dialup modem configured correctly.

 

When I rebooted into KDE, my modem which has been dialing just fine would no longer dial up to my ISP.

 

No biggie there though, Cable has finally come to this one horse town where I reside :lol:

 

I will be getting it this Friday!

[DragonMage]

Do you have an NForce2 chipset motherboard? I heard of locking up with Nforce2 Motherboards, NVidia cards, and NVidia drivers in linux. Something about NVidia driver doesn't like IRQ over 10 or something. I asked this because it happens to me with my Epox 8RDA+ until I updated my bios so that the vid card gets IRQ less than 10.