I've seen this kind of thing happen for 2 reasons I've been able to figure out on my systems... after running XFree86 4 for a few minutes with my Diamond (since taken over by S3, now SonicBlue... it's so hard to keep track) Stealth III S540 (based on the Savage 4 or 4+, I think), the system will lock up hard... 3.3.6 was no problem, and I haven't tried the latest version of X, which is now supposed to have special drivers for that chipset, and it tends to happen much more often than once every few days, but since I know nothing about your system, I thought I'd mention it... The other thing that seems to cause it is a lot of hard disk activity on an Intel PIIX3 controller (for an old Pentium/166). Copying large files to/from a Reiserfs partition with DMA enabled seems to really do the trick (I should probably send in a kernel bug report, really)... but that's another possibility, I guess. Again, tell us some more about your system (lspci often gives useful information). Now to wake up. Ben On Mon, 6 Aug 2001, Long, Mike wrote:
Hi all,
I have been having problems with my system locking to the point where I needed to press the reset button to recycle the box. Well, this happened again and this time things are not working properly after bringing the system back up. I have been able to start networking services and I can start KDE desktop but none of my X applications will run. Now I have several questions:
1) What type of problems could have been created by an improper shutdown of the box? 2) Will reinstalling KDE fix this problem? 3) How do I go about figuring out what is causing my machine to lock up? It is happening frequently (every few days) and when I am doing different things. I have not been able to determine a pattern.
Thanks, Mike