freeze and crashes

[Roland Smith]

On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 03:01:53PM +0200, Alain G. Fabry wrote:

> Have a issue here. I've been running FreeBSD 6.3 release for about 6
> months now without problem. Then last week I purchase another external
> HD and installed release 7.0. 
> Everything went great for about 3 weeks. Then suddenly my 7.0 started
> to crash (kde freezing, sudden reboots, etc). The first time happened
> when I was performing a portsnap on a FreeBSD Qemu session. It came up
> to the point where this 7.0 installation wasn't workable anymore. 
> 
> Since I need to work to earn money as the rest of us, I fell back to
> my 6.3 release external HD -> copied over my data files and now I'm
> starting to get the same symthoms. 
> 
> Input/output errors, reboot when performing a simple 'man
> something'. -> could this be a virus or something? 

More likely bad hardware, bad RAM in particular. Or a power supply
that's about to give up.

> I'm not sure how or what I can do to find out what could be the cause
> of this problem? 

Run a memory test program. Use a health monitoring program like mbmon to
check if the on-board voltage and temperature sensors produce strange values.

Hardware problems are notoriously difficult to debug.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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