Strange Freeze

[EWQ222]

After using my computer for about an hour weither I am on it or not and when I am in Gentoo (gnome) my computer randomly freezes and locks up everything, the strange part is the caps lock and scroll lock lights on my keyboard blink on and off on and off over and over again. Im forced to reset it without using a keyboard. Is this a common problem or am I special in this one?
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Never give up, Never Surrender - Galaxy Quest
emerge eternal-lands

[neilhwatson]

A peice of hardware may be failing. Are there any interesting entires in the log files prior to the lockup?
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The true guru is a teacher.
Neil Watson

[EWQ222]

I dont know the log files that well, what should I look at?
_________________
Never give up, Never Surrender - Galaxy Quest
emerge eternal-lands

[daniel_s]

Sounds like a kernel panic ;\

I'm not really sure where to go from here, I just know I've seen those lights and they meant kernel panic for me.

[pjp]

Does it happen any faster if the system is under heavy load? Such as a compile loop?
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Quis separabit? Quo animo?

[EWQ222]

It doesnt happen any faster. I tested this one left my computer on for a long time just idling, and it wasnt frozen, it was at my screensaver, moved the mouse and it froze. I also have played games on it, 3d games and it seems to freeze in about the same amount of time, Im going to time it, perhaps that has something to do with it but I am doubting.
_________________
Never give up, Never Surrender - Galaxy Quest
emerge eternal-lands

[dohko]

Hi all,

I have similar simptoms here.

I turned on my computer and kept testing dosbox with old games to see if it worked fine. I kept doing that for about two hours (which means very heavy cpu load for 2 hours, but that's nothing compared to compiling kde). Then I stopped testing it and started doing an emerge world.

I was emerging world in a tty (I usually let things emerging in ttys). Some kde application crashed while I was ending my kde session (don't remember which app) and X restarted. Since I wasn't going to use X anymore, I stopped it.

After some minutes of compilation (no more than 5) my system hanged entirely: no keyboard. I couldn't even use the magic syskeys to reboot. At this point, the kbd caps, scroll and num lights were not blinking.

I restarted the system manually. Log into kde. While I was examining the kernel log for strange entries, the system hanged up again just as badly as the other time.

Another reboot. On start up, the computer rebooted during the init proccess!! I started worrying about hardware problems, maybe the power source.

As a final try, I booted a live cd (kurumin) and it halted during boot (specifically while kudzu was configuring stuff) and the caps and scroll lights started blinking.

Ok, here is the first question: when the 3 kbd lights blinks, it's a kernel panic. What does it mean when only the caps and scroll blink?

While I'm writing this at another machine, I'm waiting for the other computer hardware to get colder in a desperate thoght that it could be a temperature problem..... No, it hangs just after a few minutes of usage.

Ok, now it's worse: my computer hanged while I was checking the bios config. That's definitely a hardware problem isn't it? Any ideas of what could it possibly be?

[gentoo_lan]

Does your motherboard give any kind of beep warnings after the post?

[dohko]

[dojan]

dohko, did you ever find the answer to your problem?
i'm getting the same error here.

i got a athlon-xp, i used the livecd install-x86-universal-2004.3-r1 and stage3-athlon-xp-2004.3

[dohko]

Hi dojan