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    #1

    Jaunty System Crashes

    My 9.04 system locks up from time to time. The: screen freezes, sound stops if playing, the clock stops, the cursor freezes and the keyboard has no effect as if it wasn't even plugged into the computer.

    I've checked my system logs using KMenu>System>System Logs Viewer, after bringing the system back up Wow! I could spend weeks figuring out some of those lines, but I don't see any errors or obvious reasons for the crashes. There are numerous CRON commands issued immediately before the crash. I know that because the next line is a simple "restart" that coincides with the time stamp when I had to force a power shut down and cold boot up.

    Interesting that when the system crashes, my data HDD makes an abnormal clicking sound followed by the activity light being constantly on. I believe it is definitely connected to my data drive behaviour in some way. I've occasionally tried to wait it out and see if the system can recover, but it never does even after 5 minutes (seems like an hour when your system dies in the middle of something important).

    What can I do to find my problem? There are several log lines I don't like, but nothing that explains the crashes. Please help.

    "If you're in a room with another person who sees the world exactly as you do, one of you is redundant." Dr. Steven Covey, The 7-Habits of Highly Effective People
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    #2
    Re: Jaunty System Crashes

    Is one of the cron jobs a heavy disc user, like updating locates db? It might be that heavy disc activity is exposing a hardware weakness.
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      #3
      Re: Jaunty System Crashes

      No, not that I can see from $top. In fact, I didn't see any cron activity at all. Can you point me in another direction please or provide a procedure to fully explore this one?
      "If you're in a room with another person who sees the world exactly as you do, one of you is redundant." Dr. Steven Covey, The 7-Habits of Highly Effective People
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        #4
        Re: Jaunty System Crashes

        It sounds like your hard disk cannot read data from some segment and tries on and on. In Windows I would recommend HDDScan to check disk out, but in Kubuntu I don't know similar software. If you have dualboot, you can use HDDScan for the whole disk. I have never heard the sound you described from a hard disk, but from CD it is common.
        Kubuntu 16.04 on two computers and Kubuntu 17.04 on DELL Latitude 13
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          #5
          Re: Jaunty System Crashes

          Would this be a Samsung drive by any chance? There were problems with a great many drives from them doing exactly what you describe. There was a firmware update from them that was suppose to correct this. You can also do a scan disk from your CD that you installed from. This scan must be done from your Kubuntu boot disk because you can not scan a mounted disk.
          Oneiric 11.10 KDE Version 4.7.4<br />Duo core 1.8 Intel<br />4 gig ram<br />Nvidia Go 7300 Graphics<br />Dell E1505 Laptop<br /><br />I&#39;m a happy pappy with Linux on my lappy!!!
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            #6
            Re: Jaunty System Crashes

            Originally posted by mhumm2
            No, not that I can see from $top. In fact, I didn't see any cron activity at all. Can you point me in another direction please or provide a procedure to fully explore this one?
            You mentioned that syslog showed cron jobs running at the time you had to shutdown. That should tell you which jobs were run, but you would have to know or experiment to see how hard they access your disc. One daily cron job is logrotate, which logs a restart that looks just like syslogd starting on booting.
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              #7
              Re: Jaunty System Crashes

              Okay, what file or command output do you need to see for the cron information? In Jaunty the /etc/crontab is very different from any crontab I've seen before. In the log view, I don't recall seeing a cron entry for logrotate.

              mhumm2
              "If you're in a room with another person who sees the world exactly as you do, one of you is redundant." Dr. Steven Covey, The 7-Habits of Highly Effective People
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                #8
                Re: Jaunty System Crashes

                /etc/crontab runs the scripts in /etc/cron.daily, weekly and monthly. Locate's db get updated daily and logrotate runs daily. Look for them in /etc/cron.daily.
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                  #9
                  Re: Jaunty System Crashes

                  Originally posted by eddieg780
                  Would this be a Samsung drive by any chance? There were problems with a great many drives from them doing exactly what you describe. There was a firmware update from them that was suppose to correct this. You can also do a scan disk from your CD that you installed from. This scan must be done from your Kubuntu boot disk because you can not scan a mounted disk.
                  Where is this firmware update? Yes, I have a samsung 2.5" drive for my laptop, and I experience sudden freezes twice in the past month, the latest this morning. In both instances, I had firefox and some other media player running (amarok 1.4 or banshee different location for the respective libraries). In both occasions, the system froze while in the middle of a song (both different files).

                  When looking at my syslog after the crash, these were the last messages:
                  Code:
                  Sep 8 09:50:01 o-toro /USR/SBIN/CRON[14253]: (root) CMD ([ -x /usr/sbin/update-motd ] && /usr/sbin/update-motd 2>/dev/null)
Sep 8 10:00:01 o-toro /USR/SBIN/CRON[22177]: (root) CMD ([ -x /usr/sbin/update-motd ] && /usr/sbin/update-motd 2>/dev/null)
Sep 8 10:00:01 o-toro /USR/SBIN/CRON[22178]: (root) CMD ([ -x /usr/sbin/update-motd ] && /usr/sbin/update-motd hourly 2>/dev/null)

Sep 8 10:01:56 o-toro syslogd 1.5.0#5ubuntu3: restart.
                  Kubuntu Jaunty
                  KDE 4.3.1
                  QT 4.5.2
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                    #10
                    Re: Jaunty System Crashes

                    My drive is the Samsung HM250JI and I downloaded the firmware through this site from here...

                    http://christianyates.com/blog/mmm-g...e-your-macbook

                    Be careful and do the upgrade exactly as the site says. If it goes wrong you'll have a dead drive.


                    Oneiric 11.10 KDE Version 4.7.4<br />Duo core 1.8 Intel<br />4 gig ram<br />Nvidia Go 7300 Graphics<br />Dell E1505 Laptop<br /><br />I&#39;m a happy pappy with Linux on my lappy!!!
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                      #11
                      Re: Jaunty System Crashes


                      "In both instances, I had firefox and some other media player running (amarok 1.4 or banshee different location for the respective libraries). In both occasions, the system froze while in the middle of a song (both different files). "

                      In case the drive update does not work. I had a similar issue with my laptop and desktop computers while using Firefox 3.0. I switched to Shiretoko (Firefox 3.5) and the freezes stopped.

                      wmrobins
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                        #12
                        Re: Jaunty System Crashes

                        The "update-motd" program is described here: http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2008/...-intrepid.html

                        It has a daily cron job but I doubt that it has anything to do with your problem. The real reason for the crashes probably couldn't be written to the HD because it was already dead before any logs could be updated, so all you are seeing is the last log update before the crash.
                        "A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
                        – John F. Kennedy, February 26, 1962.
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                          #13
                          Re: Jaunty System Crashes

                          my data HDD makes an abnormal clicking sound followed by the activity light being constantly on.
                          I've always associated that type of clicking sound with the death of the hard drive. I would backup what you need and retire the drive. It sounds like the drive is unsuccessfully trying to read from damaged sectors.
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                            #14
                            Re: Jaunty System Crashes

                            Ya, that sound is the hard drive recalibrating its head in an attempt to find a track and sector that the super blocks say should be there. It may have been happening before, but EXT4 (like the ReiserFS) would call a spare sector out of reserve to replace the defective one, until it runs out of the reserve sectors. Reformatting may help but will probably reduce the total HD space as it marks off the bad sectors and recreates a new reservoir pool of sectors. If the HD is vibrating it may be due to a worn spindle which is causing the disc plate to randomly crash into the rw heads.

                            Bottom line is that you may be needing to replace the HD.

                            BTW, have you checked your RAM with the LiveCD memory test lately?
                            "A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
                            – John F. Kennedy, February 26, 1962.
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                              #15
                              Re: Jaunty System Crashes

                              BTW, have you checked your RAM with the LiveCD memory test lately?
                              No I haven't. How exactly do I do that? Obviously I run the liveCD then I assume I open the K menu and look under system or utilities. Yes?
                              "If you're in a room with another person who sees the world exactly as you do, one of you is redundant." Dr. Steven Covey, The 7-Habits of Highly Effective People
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