Nuked System

[matt]

On Thu, 6 Oct 2011 16:29:21 -0400
jwagner at graffdeals.com wrote:

> Hi
> 
> This is an FYI message more than anything.
> 
> I started a thread on the FreeBSD forums regarding something that
> happened to one of my new systems.  I installed using the onboard
> video card and had problems - KDE screensaver wouldn't start,
> libreoffice trouble, etc. Was hoping that getting a standalone would
> solve them, so I installed it. Erased the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file
> because the onboard chip is radeon and the standalone is nvidia.  Per
> the handbook, startx may work without configuration.  However, when I
> did startx as a regular user, it didn't work and upon reboot, my
> system won't make it through the boot process to a prompt.
> 
> Don't know if the problem is in X11, KDE, or somewhere else, but
> wanted to let somebody know as it's a very serious bug to have.  You
> can find all the details and steps I took in the thread found at
> http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=26849  Feel free to e-mail
> me for more information, but my plan is to wipe the system & start
> over in the near future unless I get some help on how to get it
> working.
> 
> Thanks for your time. 
> 
> Jim
> 
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I read your thread.

I'm fairly sure that has nothing to do with X. Personally, I'd
immediately suspect bad disks, motherboard or ram. There are so many
individually configurable steps in a FreeBSD desktop system that it is
quite hard to say there weren't software issues, but they usually don't
cause the type of hard crash it sounds like you had. 

For point of reference, what is the manufacturer of the system board,
RAM chips and nVidia card? Does this all work fine in
Windows/Linux/BeOS/whatever else runs on that configuration?

Random crashes (kde etc...) could indicate hardware failures...