FreeBSD Locked Up

[Loren M. Lang]

I have been using FreeBSD 4.9 on a Compaq Presario laptop for about 3
1/2 months now without any troubles, and before that RedHat Linux for
about a year and a half.  Just yesterday morning though I awoke to find
my system completely frozen, no screensaver was on, but I couldn't move
the mouse pointer, switch vcs, or ssh in, though, strangely enough I
could ping it.  Is there anything I can do now to try and figure out why
it might of crashed or is there any possible cause?

Also, on reboot, I notice fsck took a considerable time to check the
disk, though nothing major was found that interrupted the boot process.
Is this because FreeBSD doesn't use a journalling filesystem?  I think I
read somewhere that FreeBSD chose to use a filesystem with soft updates
over a journalling one because it provides relatively equal data integrity
compared to a journalling one, but is more efficient with the order of
writing data, but does this mean that FreeBSD will always take longer to
recover from a crash?

-- 
I sense much NT in you.
NT leads to Bluescreen.
Bluescreen leads to downtime.
Downtime leads to suffering.
NT is the path to the darkside.
Powerful Unix is.

Public Key: ftp://ftp.tallye.com/pub/lorenl_pubkey.asc
Fingerprint: B3B9 D669 69C9 09EC 1BCD  835A FAF3 7A46 E4A3 280C
 
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