Disk corruption and complete freezes. :(
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
linux (Ubuntu) |
Expired
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
After some digging and tinkering, I suspect iwlagn / wireless networking.
Symptoms / timeline:
- I've had this laptop (Lenovo T500) less than two weeks now.
- I have an external SATA hard drive connected to the laptop with the help of a PCMCIA adapter.
- The system hangs completely from time to time.
- At first I suspected VirtualBox: The hangs were happening when working with Windows instances on the external SATA drive.
- Additionally, the VirtualBox images were being corrupted, usually e.g. when downloading & installing XP SP2
- Once the drive itself was corrupted, although this might be from the hard-power-off: Had to rescue some directories from lost+found after an fsck.
- Then, I suspected the external drive of being bad, or maybe the adapter causing problems. (It has been working great for years.)
- Oops, there were files on my internal drive being corrupted too! (Found a bunch of binary crap inside a header file. Forcing a reinstall of the package via aptitude made it better. Right now debsums reports that everything is matching up so far, besides a bunch of .desktop files....)
- And, I've now gotten a handful of lockups without vbox running at all.
- The typical freeze: No mouse movement, music playing loops infinitely over the last 1/10 of a second or so of sound, caps lock key flashes; nothing to do but hold down the power button.
- Two nontypical freezes as well:
- One, firefox (and possibly any new process, but I was trying to get work done at the time) would fail with "Bus error" when trying to start it from the command line; restarting made the issue go away.
- Two, no new processes would start at all. I was able to switch to a console and try to log in there -- the login worked but bash never came up.
- That second one was spewing kernel output once I got to a console, including messages about iwlagn or intel wireless, I forget which.
I'm currently stresstesting the system on a wired connection.
Possibly related:
http://
https:/
https:/
lkml thread "bad DMAR interaction with iwlagn and SATA"
Besides the obvious and eagerly anticipated fix, this is enough of a problem that a workaround would be very very very nice. (I'd almost rather have the hard lockups every time than occasional silent disk corruption, and I'm considering doing a clean install over a wired network just in case.)
I'm happy to attach any additional logs or information missed by ubuntu-bug.
Thanks and cheers.
ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
HibernationDevice: RESUME=
MachineType: LENOVO 2081CTO
Package: linux-image-
ProcCmdLine: root=UUID=
ProcEnviron:
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSign
SourcePackage: linux
I do experience something similar to your problem, and I have found that it is because disk failures. You could use dd from a livecd (or smartctl) to see if your problem has the same source as mine.