[ILUG-BOM] sad and depressed - Help! system hangs, files vanish

[Animesh Singh]

Evening Vikram,

The below mention file corruption problem can be
'ucase of memory or
disk problem. Either binaries / files getting corrupt
in ram or on disk. 'cause As u have already tried
running fsck. Which points out to disk failure. but to
be little more sure we need to do little exercise. We
need to run the memtest86 on the system. Which is
available on following url: http://www.memtest.org/

Its mostly the disk problem, but still we will be
clear once the memtest86 is run on the system. It will
clearify whether the files / binaries are getting
corrupted in ram or disk.

Hope this answers ur queries.


--- Vickram Crishna <vvcrishna at radiophony.com> wrote:
> Hello
> 
> I am a new user, and new to this list too, although
> I was here a 
> couple of years back too.
> 
> I am running Red Hat 9.0 on my home PC, and the
> installation (which 
> was a simple straightforward home selection from the
> install choice 
> menu) has some troubling behaviour - namely the
> computer hangs from 
> time to time. The hardware is an old Compaq Celeron,
> with 128 MB. It 
> lacks a reset button, and in fact lacks an off
> switch. When the 
> machine hangs I have no choice but to pull the plug
> from the mains. 
> It has an On switch, but pressing this twice will
> not restart the 
> machine. In fact, once the switch is pressed on, it
> no longer has any 
> function. When the machine hangs I lose control of
> both the mouse and 
> the keyboard. This happens at least once a week (the
> machine is 
> usually on).
> 
> So far so good - or not so good.
> 
> When it reboots, it goes through a file system
> integrity check 
> routine, which always reaches around 99% and then
> stops, asking me to 
> use Ctrl-D to reboot again, which I do. It then
> completes the 
> integrity check rapidly and restarts properly. On
> two occasions 
> (including right now) this has gone awry.
> 
> Right now, although it allows me to start up under
> the registered 
> login identities (including root) the GUI has been
> disturbed, with 
> the standard icons and the wallpaper missing. I
> logged in as root and 
> found the files missing from the /home/[username]
> folder were 
> visible, but greyed out. The Find command says the
> files do not exist.
> 
> What is worse is that the downloaded mail (no longer
> on the mail 
> server) is also apparently gone, and the Mozilla
> identity destroyed.
> 
> This happened once before, just after I had
> tediously completed 
> updating the Address Book (transferred from my other
> laptop). I am 
> seriously dismayed at the thought of having to do it
> once more, plus 
> of course not being able to retrieve those mails,
> one or two of which 
> are critical.
> 
> Can anyone guide me on a) how to prevent it hanging
> in the first 
> place and b) how to recover the missing
> identities/files (actually 
> since the identity login and passwords work,
> apparently the system is 
> partially aware of the users, but their files are
> now unreachable 
> (even the ones whose filenames I can see greyed
> out), including the 
> desktop wallpaper selection.
> 
> If this is a problem already discussed here, please
> just point me to 
> the thread, or else do mail me directly if you have
> a way forward.
> -- 
> Vickram
> 
> -- 
> http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/mailman/listinfo/linuxers



	
		
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