Gentoo Crashes Requiring Hard Reboot

JCScoobyRS · n00b Joined: 18 Dec 2003 Posts: 57 Location: Colorado, USA

Ever since I installed Gentoo about 4 months ago, intermittenly, my system will just freeze and become unresponsive requireing a hard reboot. There is no pattern to it so I'm unsure what could be the problem. I have an NVidia TNT RIVA, it's an old HP Pavilion 8590C, and I followed the install docs to install the whole system, including the video card. Has anyone else had this type of problem and if so, have you fixed it? Could someone give me some ideas to look at as I'm out of mine. Thanks, Jeremy
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Halcy0n · Posted: Fri Jan 16, 2004 5:23 pm Post subject:

Do you have ACPI support compiled in? My old box used to have problems like that, and it ended up being problems with ACPI, so I just turned it off. Not the same hardware as you though. Might be something to look at though.
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JCScoobyRS · n00b Joined: 18 Dec 2003 Posts: 57 Location: Colorado, USA

I've already turned that off. It seemed to help but it still happens...
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mhodak · Veteran Joined: 15 Nov 2003 Posts: 1218

Try disabling agp, if you use it.
Also, I once had similar problem caused by faulty memory. Running memtest to check it can't hurt.

converter · Apprentice Joined: 24 Dec 2002 Posts: 163

Do the keyboard indicator LEDs begin flashing off/on in unison when this problem occurs? If so, you're experiencing a Machine Check Exception (which as far as I can tell is always a hardware failure), which should be logged.
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JCScoobyRS · n00b Joined: 18 Dec 2003 Posts: 57 Location: Colorado, USA

Nope. The only way the lights flash is if I hit the "Tab/Num/Scroll" lock buttons. Those actually work but the system is hosed to it doesn't respond. Thanks for the idea, Jeremy
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_dan_ · n00b Joined: 20 Jan 2004 Posts: 19 Location: Aylesbury

i think i have exact the same problem ...

it just freezes and i can't do anything,

first i thougt it's because of my aggressive compiler flags but then i used only

-O2 -march=pentium4-fprefetch-loop-arrays -funroll-loops
which realy should run but it doesn't

finaly i used a stage3-version for pentium4.

I took me about 5 try's to get a running system, and it even crashed while no xserver was installed on emerging things ( most likely when i tried to run 2 emerges on different consoles ( so i didn't do this anymore).

the logfiles also don't tell me anything spezial. disabling apm, agp, apic, acpi or dma ( i thougt it's may be a problem of the harddisk) . but the system just froze without any message.

WindowsXP, 2000 and freeBSD is running on this machine absolutley stable, i'm realy at the end of my wisdom

btw.. is there a documentation for the grp installation? i realy want a gentoo ( don't like another linux/unix:

suse: because i had to use it at my old job and was not satisfied with it
red-hat: was not as bad as suse but not my thing - build a clusterdistribution with it
debian: you like it or you don't like it, i like it, but i'm more used to gentoo
behive: too much work, it's a gentoo without emerge

freebsd: winex binary isn't working

so i have to keep windows alive

/* EDIT: found it, it's been a while since i read the installationmanual from the very beginning

. i think a deserved a rtfm in this point

*/

i had gentoo runing on my old machine and it worked fine.
is there somewhere a doc which describe how the grp installation is working, what i have to download for it, and how it is configured.

thx

edit: i think one thing is there which is a bit strange, i'm not sure but i think eveytime i had such a freeze the network was active ( downloading something, surfing, emerge .... ).

I've heard of kernelfreezes with 2.6 but not that much with 2.4 in the german forum.
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