Dealing with lockups

Message

Pfuzz3r · #1 Post by **Pfuzz3r** » 2006-07-21 06:08

How long should a person wait to power-off a locked-up system?

bluesdog · #2 Post by **bluesdog** » 2006-07-21 07:02

Just about....

now!

Debian_TUXFAN · #3 Post by **Debian_TUXFAN** » 2006-07-22 23:24

if the system is truly locked up meaning you are unable to move the mouse or anything of that nature cold booting is fine right away

bluesdog · #4 Post by **bluesdog** » 2006-07-23 00:10

What Debian_TUXFAN said.

To find out if the system is really locked up, or if it's just an application running amok, press <ctrl><alt><f3> to see if you can switch to another terminal.

If you do get a CLI, (command line interface), login as root, and do

Code: Select all

ps -aux

to see what is currently running. Make a note of anything that seems to be using an excessive amount of resources.

From a CLI, as root, you can restart the machine by typing

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reboot

The advantage is this will enable the filesystem to shut down more cleanly than a hard reset.

Incidentally, if you are experiencing frequent hard lockups, where you cannot even switch to another terminal, the most likely culprit is hardware.

Debian_TUXFAN · #5 Post by **Debian_TUXFAN** » 2006-07-23 00:39

you are correct bluesdog I was assuming that Pfuzz3r was unable to get to another console

bluesdog · #6 Post by **bluesdog** » 2006-07-23 00:55

Yeah. A while back I discovered famd was totally borking my system by hogging resources. The symptoms of something using upwards of 90% system resources acts very much like a lockup!

A faulty hard disk data cable can completely lock up the system: No mouse/keyboard etc.

Problem with hardware faults, especially intermittent ones, is they are often really difficult to track down.