laptop freezes when tilted, but only when in linux

[aaronhoy]

Yeah, the title pretty much sums it up. This one blow my mind. I am doing a dual boot of debian etch 2 and winxp. Just recently I noticed that every time I move my laptop out of my lap and onto the the table it freezes. Yeah, linux freezing, un-heard of, right? Anyway it just totally locks, the image stays in the buffer but the CPU totally halts and respons to no interupts etc. Upon further investigation I found that this happens when I tilt the laptop up and to the left. It ONLY happens in linux though. when I am booted into windows tilting does not do anything.

any ideas?

[SweetLou]

Don't tilt it.

[truoc444]

reseat the ram, processor and hard drive. sounds like one of them might be loose and it moving. also make sure your processor isn't overheating and just stopping when you tilt.

[aaronhoy]

how would that explain it only freezing in debian then? The laptop is new and I havn't dropped it yet or anything, I dont see how anything could be loose. Heatlock sounds possible, but that shouldn't have to do with tilting it....

[truoc444]

the whole tilting thing baffles me since it only happens in linux. maybe try disabling acpi and see if that cures it. also make sure the battery isn't shorting out. maybe it's something that freaks out linux (also due to acpi) but doesn't bother windows.

[aaronhoy]

I did some more experimentation. Since everytime it happened before I was in X, I couldn't see any of the kernel messages. During startup before X had started I tilted the computer up and it spewed the following onto the screen. There was more of course that went off the top of the screen, and I abbreviated with blah's because it was tedious to type everything:

[<c012fa70>] note_interrupt+0x75/0x99
[<c012f570>] __do_IRQ+0x1d/0x28
[<c0104985>] do_IRQ+0x1d/0x28
[<c01034...
...
blah blah blah pagefualt,
blah blah blah ipw2200,
blah blah blah common_interrupt
blah blah blah ACPI
blah blah blah cpu_idle
blah blah blah start kernel
...
[<c02ec690>] start_kernel+0x17b/0x17f
handlers:
[<e02415ce>] (snd_intel8x0_interrupt+0x0/0x1c2 [snd_intel8x0])
[<e0330a67>] (ipw_isr+0x0/0x88 [ipw2200])
Disabling IRQ #169
_


At the very bottom the cursor continued to blink although the computer didn't respond to any interrupts. A friend informed me, however, that this is ok because the blinking cursor is actually handled by the graphics hardware, so the cpu can still be halted even though it is blinking. IPW is intel pro wireless and as you can see there is also sounds stuff and crap about various other hardware, interrupts, and the cpu. I assume the hexcodes out to the sides are the location of the kernel's handlers for these events or what the PC was when the interrupts happened.
Does this stuff help anyone to make any sense out of this? I am still stumped. Next I will try disabling ACPI and tilting it.

[dravenloft]

The errors your getting I don't understand, but I have a suggestion for what might be happening.

A hardware problem that Linux is noticing but windows is not. Is your XP install unstable (for XP I mean)?

I ask, because I've experienced an issue before where a CPU of mine will halt during boot for linux. The chip is actually bad, but Windows will boot it, and then proceed to do 101 more stupid things than usual after between 5min and an hour and then freeze. This was a desktop, and is meant only for example. Still, might want to have it checked out.

Someone suggested something could be loose, it still could be. Even new. Just because you didn't drop it doesn't mean someone before you bought it didn't.

[aaronhoy]

sorry I should clarify. The laptop is new in that it's less than a year old, but it is not literally brand new in that I have never had a working copy of linux on it. I do take very good care of it, though, and I have never dropped it or even bumped it on anything enough to jar anything loose. I got it in January and I had debian etch on it working perfectly from then until recently, when I switched to etch 2 (or etch beta 2, or whatever, the new release they came out with). If it came with loose hardware (bad hardware), then it seems like it would have happened always. There must be some hardware that etch2 is using that the others dont. I just cant figure out what it is

[dravenloft]

sorry I should clarify. The laptop is new in that it's less than a year old, but it is not literally brand new in that I have never had a working copy of linux on it. I do take very good care of it, though, and I have never dropped it or even bumped it on anything enough to jar anything loose. I got it in January and I had debian etch on it working perfectly from then until recently, when I switched to etch 2 (or etch beta 2, or whatever, the new release they came out with). If it came with loose hardware (bad hardware), then it seems like it would have happened always. There must be some hardware that etch2 is using that the others dont. I just cant figure out what it is

Have you considered an exorcist?