Re: HD dying?

On Wed, Apr 05, 2017 at 08:26:12PM -0400, David Niklas wrote:
> The symptoms leading up to the event was a sudden freeze of the OS. I was
> not too bright about Linux at the time, so I thought that perhaps X froze.
> Now I'm getting the identical thing, a sudden freeze. I can ping the
> kernel, I cannot restore the frame buffer, sync, or umount the
> file systems. My syslog metalog records no messages during this period,
> it is set to sync the dmesg messages. I cannot ssh, but I can uses sysreq
> to reboot. I'm using OpenRC.
Metalog would only be useful is writes to disk were succeeding. It's
certainly possible for the kernel to hang in such a state that there is
kernel panic, and writes to disk are not happening (this includes
sending the sysrq-sync command).

That you can ping the kernel simply says that there's enough left
running for the kernel to handle ICMP without going to userspace.

That you can't SSH says something in userspace failed (which could be a
myriad of reasons).

Just because the system seems to freeze does not mean that the drive is
faulty. Also entirely possible there is a logged drive event in dmesg
that you can't see.

If you can repeat it, consider some of the following to get a better
insight as to what's going on.
- set up serial kernel console or network kernel console logging.
- set up kdump or similar.

That's not to say that the drive isn't the source of the problem, just
that it's not likely based on the output you've shown.

You say this is a laptop, and the drive by power hours has racked up
~1.5 years of usage, so it possibly hasn't been opened in at least that
long. How much dust has built up inside it? Overheating of the graphics
CAN cause the symptoms you've described.

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
Gentoo Linux: Dev, Infra Lead, Foundation Trustee & Treasurer
E-Mail   : [email protected]
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