Steve, I agree with Tim, you have a hardware problem somewhere on your mother- board, CPU, or memory. The first thing I would check is the cooling fans & heat sink fins. The fins should all be free of dust, and the fans should all be whirring happily, especially the one on your CPU. If you live in a dusty place the dust can gum up the fan motors and stop them from turning. This almost certainly leads to a system lock-up, if it's the CPU fan and you have a hot CPU. The power supply fan etc. should also be spinning when powered. If all the cooling fans look OK, then I would suspect a memory chip/simm/ dimm failure. If you have DIMMs and have more than one, try removing one of them and see if it works any better. If not, keep swapping them out until you identify a problem DIMM, or else decide that the memory is not the problem. I would also try turning off the external cache on the motherboard using the BIOS setup program; perhaps one of the cache chips has gone bad. I don't believe in any memory testing software's ability to identify bad memory chips. I think it would require some faith... I haven't had any USB problems but I don't run USB-enabled kernels on very many systems. Your boot-up problems, where Linux refuses to boot past the error message and prompt, has to do with corrupt filesystems, and Tim's advice is the same I would give. If the "yes" answer to all of fsck's questions fails to fix the problem, then you've got worse problems than it appears and thus have bigger things to worry about anyway. Good luck! Jim > Yikes! > Linux doesn't crash regularly like Windows, at least not in my > experience. If this is a brand new machine, I would look very closely > at your hardware. Any bios updates on the motherboard manufacturers > website? Any kernel logs that might help decide what happended? (the > files in /var/log/)? There is a program called memtest (and memtest86) > that will test your RAM for bad chips. I would look into stuff like > this first. I have a motherboard that will crash if I run a kernel with > USB enabled. Come to think of it, it is an Athlon system (not T-bird > though), with the AMD 750 chipset. And my Dad's Windows machine with an > Abit KT7 (Via KX133 chips) had USB problems. Hmm, maybe USB problems > would be worth looking into...? > As far as your scandisk question, the kernel will automatically check > your disks if the disk is marked 'dirty.' It will stop if it runs into > so many errors it feels it wants your guidance. It should drop you into > single-user mode, you may or may not need the root password to log in. > Once it lets you in (with disks mounted read only), run e2fsck /dev/hdxy > where x is the drive letter (a if it is the first), and y is the > parition number (1 if it is the first). Pretty much tell it yes to > everything it asks you. You may have to do this for each of your file > systems if you have more than one partion or hard drive. And this > assumes you have ext2 filesystems (seems likely). > HTH > Tim > On Tue, Feb 06, 2001 at 05:07:46PM -0700, Steven & Julia Hulse wrote: > > changing themes. My question is how do I safely unlock my PC without > > destroying Linux? The only thing I could do is just hit the reset button, (I > > know that's probably not what I should do thus the question.), and then it > > reboots and apparently wants me to run something like scandisk but to be > > perfectly hones, I have no clue! At that point I can't even get Linux to > > boot, it just sits on an error message and a prompt. > > > > Thanks > > Steve Hulse > > > > _______________________________________________ > > CLUE-Talk mailing list > > CLUE-Talk@clue.denver.co.us > > http://clue.denver.co.us/mailman/listinfo/clue-talk > > > -- > =================================================================== > == Timothy Klein || And what rough beast == > == teece@hypermall.net || Its hour come round at last == > == Aufwiedersehen! || Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? == > == Aufwiedersehen! || The beast of Redmond, nothing more. == > =================================================================== > _______________________________________________ > CLUE-Talk mailing list > CLUE-Talk@clue.denver.co.us > http://clue.denver.co.us/mailman/listinfo/clue-talk -- Jim Ockers (ockers@ockers.net) Ask me about Linux! Contact info: please see http://www.ockers.net/ Fight Spam! Join CAUCE (Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email) at http://www.cauce.org/ .