[Solved] Troubleshooting a hard lock-up of the system

[matteorr]

2 days in a row my system has locked-up so bad that the mouse stops responding and ctrl-alt-f1 doesn't switch me to a shell.  I had to use the REISUB method to reboot.  I have no idea what is causing the issue because I wasn't doing anything special either time and the system did not show any symptoms prior to the freezes.  My question is, what is the best way to troubleshoot the issue?  Is there a set of logs somewhere that I could look at?  I assume it's locking so fast that any actual errors won't be able to be written to the log after the problem occurs, but I thought there might be some warnings or something that could point me in the right direction.

Thanks in advance!

[pags]

Few things off the top of my head:

Check dmesg, messages log and X.org log...
Run a memory test

What kind of hardware?  Can you check the PSU?

Install Smartmontools (sp?) and check harddrive...

If I think of others, I'll post (I'm sure others. will, as well)...

[menotu]

Additionally, maybe create a new user account and see if the freeze occurs in that one, if it doesn't it might point to something specific in the account that's freezing

[matteorr]

I looked through the messages log and saw "kernel BUG at include/linux/swapops.h:105!" from around the time that it froze.  I don't know what that means, but I looked to see which kernel I was running and it was 2.6.38.8-pclos1.bfs, whereas the newest one is 2.6.38.8-pclos3.bfs.  I have upgraded it and rebooted to see if it helps.  I'll wait a few days to see if I have any more freezes and report back.

Thanks for the suggestions!

[menotu]

Hi matteorr

If you have 4GB (or more) of memory on your system you can use a pae.bfs kernel which will then see all of it whereas the non pae versions don't

[matteorr]

I believe my issue has been solved.  Thanks for the pointers!

Also, I only have 3 gigs of memory on my workstation, but I do use the pae kernel at home.