Re: [gentoo-user] X Freezes With Firefox on Many Post 2.6.38 Kernels

[Joost Roeleveld <joost@antarean.org>]

On Wednesday 27 July 2011 17:18:19 James Wall wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 4:03 PM, Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Here is a update.  Let's see what folks think about this situation.  I
> > mentioned in another thread that I did a from scratch kernel.  It was a
> > .35 version.  It seemed to work fine, for a while.  When I tell
> > Seamonkey to download to my desktop, it works fine.  The minute I tell
> > it to save it to my large 750Gb drive, I get a kernel panic.  Keep in
> > mind, there is nothing OS related on that drive.  Nothing OS at all.
> >  It is videos, CD ISO's and such as that.
> > 
> > Here is another thing I just found out.  I did download a few videos I
> > wanted to save.  They were on my desktop and who likes desktop clutter.
> >  So, I dragged them over to the large data drive.  I did this by
> > dragging from the desktop to a open Konqueror window.  This was not
> > downloading or anything, just a straight move operation.  It copied a
> > few Mbs and panic. This had nothing to do with Seamonkey either.
> 
> This looks like a drive/cable issue, since it only occurs on the one
> drive. If both drives are SATA, I would try swapping the cables to
> rule out a bad cable. If the problem stays with the drive I would
> first try a different SATA port to see if that clears up the issue.

I would also check that all the cables are plugged in properly and that there 
is nothing conductive (like metal) touching the drive where it really 
shouldn't.
Maybe open the case, take the drive out and put it on a big sturdy cardboard 
box to avoid possible shorts.
> 
> > So, did this issue just move from a Seamonkey sort of problem to
> > completely something else?  Hmmmmm.  After the crash, I boot to single
> > user mode.  I ran resierfsck --fix-fixable on the drive.  Not one
> > error.

Did you do that on a mounted drive? I would first try a filesystem check before 
using that command.

> > I ran the smart thingy and not one error there either.

Did you force the short and long tests to be run and waited for them to be 
finished? On a large drive, the long test can easily take several hours 
(without any indication of how far it actually is)

> >  Thinking file system is bad in the kernel, well my /home directory is
> > on reiserfs too.  It is the one that works.

If it were the reiserfs implementation, the issue would be more common.

> > Now, what the heck is this about?  Does this make sense to anyone?

It does, there is something wrong with that drive.

Another thing you could try is to plug that drive into a different machine (I 
believe you still have your old one?) and see if the same issue occurs there.
Also, now would be a good time to have backups of the data on that drive :)

-- 
Joost