Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.wildstar.net!cancer.vividnet.com!hunter.premier.net!news.mathworks.com!news.sgi.com!sdd.hp.com!night.primate.wisc.edu!newsspool.doit.wisc.edu!scooby.beloit.edu!stu!walcottt From: walcottt@stu.beloit.edu (Tom Walcott) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Hanging/Crashing FreeBSD. Date: 7 Oct 1996 21:26:16 GMT Organization: Beloit College Lines: 32 Message-ID: <53bsho$a9a@scooby.beloit.edu> Reply-To: walcottt@stu.beloit.edu NNTP-Posting-Host: stu.beloit.edu X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] I recently bought another 16 MBs of RAM for my machine, which is running FreeBSD and DOS. Under DOS, everything seems hunky dory. Under FreeBSD, however, I seem to occasionally run into problems. If I leave the screen saver running and the computer idling for any extended period of time (a few hours), I will come back to find it frozen. Nothing to do except reset. If I play around in X for a while and open up a couple applications, or if I start doing a heavy compile, I tend to get a spontaneous reboot. Occasionally, I have gotten page fault messages as icing to the cake. In addition to all this, I've had a few messages about trouble writing to the hard drive (an IDE, which I understand makes bad sector location/marking very exciting.) My initial thoughts were that the RAM was bad in some way, but I've been looking at the system stats under X, and it seems as if the RAM is almost always fully in use; if it just needed to warm up, I'd have expected to see it crash more often upon reboot, or under DOS. My next thought was that the swap space could be corrupt, so I played around with that, to no avail; I changed the sizes, etc. I ran bad144, and it didn't find anything of interest that wasn't already marked. After all this, I moved to 2.1.5, and the problems persisted. I'm at something of my wits end on this, and I find that using a computer prone to spontaneous rebooting is less than delightful. I'm using a 486 DX2/66, with 28 megs of RAM; 72 pin 8 mb SIMM, 72 pin 4 mb SIMM, 4 30 pin 4 MB SIMMS. I've got FreeBSD installed across two IDE drives, a 500 and a gig, and it's taking up roughly half of each. Prior to installing the new RAM, I had 24 megs of swap, and after installing the new stuff I went up to 56 megs. Any suggestions or thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Tom -- The good opinions expressed are my own. The bad opinions expressed were inserted by my enemies. Flame them. Repeatedly.