[SOLVED] System freezing at random times

[YouCanToo]

Hey guys, I am running a AMDX2 2.2Gz with 2 gig memory, 250 gig sata3 hard drive and a Nvidia 7400 video card. I just recently upgraded it from 2009 to 2010 and up till now it has seemed to be running fin. It is fully updated. The last couple of days it locks up tight. When it locks up the scroll lock and the one to the right of it flashes about every second. Nothing responds, the keyboard and mouse are frozen.  Normally after a hard reboot it telles me there was a file system problem. Doing a fsck /dev/sda5 and I am back in business, well at least for the rest of the day. This afternoon when I cam home it was frozen again. Doing a fsck on it, it complained about allot of cross links and the such. Finall it did boot. While running it I had opened the system activity and was watching as firefox was acting really weird and I noticed something I have never saw. When Firefox started acting weird the CPU% in the system activity window did not report the percentage but instead said "disk sleep" this happened several times and than the plasma process said the same thing and the system froze up and those same two lights started flashing.

Has anyone else seen this happen or have a clue as to what is going on here? I am open to suggestions on how to figure this one out. Thanks for any help in advance.

[coffeetime]

Kernel? Did you try to reinstall?

[YouCanToo]

No I have not tried a reinstall of the kernel. Right no it is using the bfs kernel, do you think using another one might fix this issue?

[T6]

try the a64 kernel

i had similar problems and i am experiencing them but since i have them since 2009.1(almost1 year now)and i can't do a single thing, system just freezes with sometimes mouse movement i can't report any disk usage, it seems to be on my case a mix of hardware and software, firefox, compiz and my ati card on a board with a onboard s3 card(disabled)

one question, what advantages gives bfs over other kernels?

[Hootiegibbon]

YouCanToo,

I have found that the a64 kernel is faster and a tad more stable than the BFS kernel on K8 arch hardware.

Jase

[YouCanToo]

Well I tried using a different kernel and still am having the same problem. I am going to pull the hard drive. Things are pointing to a bad hard drive, I think. I have a spare 250 gig sata here so I am going to do some swapping.  Thanks for the suggestion(s) I will post back on what I find out.

[YouCanToo]

UPDATE:

  It appears that the hard drive was causing the problem. I removed and replaced the hard drive formatted and reinstalled 2010 and it is now running smoothly. Funny how the other drive has went south in less than 2 months. Oh well time to send it back for a warranty replacement.

[T6]

2 months?

western digital or seagate?

[YouCanToo]

It is a Western Digital and it didn't make it quite to 2 months. I bought 5 of them on sale at 29.95 ea. Oh well that is what the warranty is for I guess.