relatively urgent question (about X)

[Nathan Kinkade]

On Fri, May 21, 2004 at 01:51:02PM -0700, Gary Kline wrote:
> On Fri, May 21, 2004 at 02:40:58PM -0600, Nathan Kinkade wrote:
> > On Fri, May 21, 2004 at 10:50:46AM -0700, Gary Kline wrote:
> > > 	For some months I've had increasing troubles with my 
> > > 	4.9/4.10 abruptly crashing.  This morning I found my
> > > 	workhorse server, tao, down and hung up while trying to
> > > 	fsck /usr.  I cleaned everything thoroughly and then
> > > 	started xdm.  The grey screen showed, the mouse was frozen;
> > > 	after 30 seconds, BOOM.  Another crash.  After yet 
> > > 	another round of fsck's, I tried startx.  To see what 
> > > 	errs might kill the X11 boot.  No: same blank grey screen,
> > > 	same frozen mouse,same OS crash.
> > > 
> > > 	I tried /stand/sysinstall to reconfigure X.  No luck.
> > > 	I'm now doing my next stable sup upgrade and am doing
> > > 	yet another buildworld  && buildkernel.
> > > 
> > > 	I doubt this will resolve the X Window snafu, tho.  So:::
> > > 	what x11/*XFree* ports do I have to fetch/build/install??
> > > 	((I'm assuming the reason for the crash was X-related,
> > > 	but this is only a first-SWAG.) Also, if anybody has had a 
> > > 	similar problem, please let me know.
> > > 
> > > 	tia, people,
> > > 
> > > 	gary, ssh'd in from ethic.thought.org
> > 
> > Could this be a hardware issue?  All other things being mostly constant
> > I wouldn't think that software usually all of a sudden goes bad or gets
> > misconfigured.  Possibly it got corrupted on the disk for some reason,
> > but then I might wonder what caused the disk to get corrupted in the
> > first place.  How about trying a new video card and/or peripherals?
> > This is assuming that your setup was working one day and then the next
> > went bad, or if it is flaky and intermittent.
> > 
> > Nathan
> 
> 
> 	Yes, it certainly could be a bad disc or even bad DIMM.
> 	I'm running an i815 motherboard that had video/audio
> 	built in.  But the drive may have gotten kicked or bumped.
> 	How can I test a 40G drive??
> 
> 	gary

Well, any program checking every single block on a 40GB drive would
definitely take a long time to complete.  I was more suggesting that a
hardware problem might be causing the lockup, exclusive of the hardrive.
I have seen a bad video card cause X to completely crash a system while
X is intitializing.  If you had an extra video card around it might be
worth plugging it in and giving it a try.

Nathan
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