New install on laptop... X/GDM issues

[TruthSeeker]

Wow the forums sure have changed since I've been here last...
I've been using Debian on my Toshiba Satellite A65-s126 happily for a number of months now, and I've decided to take the plunge to Gentoo

The base system install went pretty well (apart from some minor ACPI issues which I'll get to later). I got X up and running okay, except for the following message in the syslog:

Dec 30 18:28:05 JLaptop mtrr: 0xa0000000,0x8000000 overlaps existing 0xa0000000,0x4000000
Dec 30 18:28:05 JLaptop mtrr: 0xa0000000,0x8000000 overlaps existing 0xa0000000,0x4000000
Dec 30 18:28:05 JLaptop mtrr: 0xa0000000,0x8000000 overlaps existing 0xa0000000,0x4000000

which happens whenever I start X (yes, it prints 3 times). From what I've read this has to do with the AGP (ATI Radeon 7000 w/ 64MB shared RAM).

So I emerge'd gnome, which took about 16 hours. Then I added hald and famd to the default runlevel, as the manual recommended.

I didn't notice this at the time, but a few hours into the build the syslog started printing the following message:

Dec 31 14:36:47 JLaptop hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
Dec 31 14:36:47 JLaptop hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=66214078, high=3, low=15882430, sector=66214050
Dec 31 14:36:47 JLaptop ide: failed opcode was: unknown
Dec 31 14:36:47 JLaptop end_request: I/O error, dev hda, sector 66214050

There are a bunch of these, with slightly different sector numbers, occuring every few minutes. If it's any help, the preceding messages were:

Dec 31 14:08:13 JLaptop groupadd[17150]: new group: name=messagebus, gid=407
Dec 31 14:08:13 JLaptop useradd[17165]: new user: name=messagebus, uid=101, gid=407, home=/dev/null, shell=/bin/false
Dec 31 14:10:15 JLaptop groupadd[27352]: new group: name=haldaemon, gid=408
Dec 31 14:10:15 JLaptop useradd[27370]: new user: name=haldaemon, uid=102, gid=408, home=/dev/null, shell=/bin/false
Dec 31 14:14:00 JLaptop groupadd[13837]: new group: name=rpc, gid=111
Dec 31 14:14:00 JLaptop useradd[13849]: new user: name=rpc, uid=111, gid=111, home=/dev/null, shell=/bin/false

After adding xdm to the default runlevel (configured to load gdm), I rebooted. When it was time for X to come up, it took rather longer than it had before, and when the checkered pattern came up, it died and tried to start again. This happened a number of times, until I finally got an ncurses-looking dialog saying

Jan  1 00:24:22 JLaptop gdm[5976]: The display server has been shut down about 6 times in the last 90 seconds. It is likely that something bad is going on.  Waiting for 2 minutes before trying again on display :0.

I let it try again... same thing. I looked at the syslog, and it was filled with the dma_intr error, the mtrr error, and now a new one:

Jan  1 00:21:34 JLaptop hald[5727]: Timed out waiting for hotplug event 432. Rebasing to 446

all interspersed. I killed gdm and shutdown.

Here's one last fact if it's any help: Since the beginning of the installation, I noticed that the drive was spinning down/up a lot (it never does in Debian -- I could probably get it to, but I haven't bothered). I was a little concerned that it was doing this too much, so I did hdparm -S12 /dev/hda to set the spindown timer to 1 minute (and added that to /etc/conf.d/hdparm).

Does anyone know what's going on, and how I could fix it?
Thanks.

[deltaflyer]

have you looked here for your prob http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthre...eadid=33736241

might help

andy

[TruthSeeker]

I saw that page but figured it wasn't for me because I haven't seen anything about fglrx on my system. Now I've tried its suggestions anyway, to no avail. I added the boot option video=vesafb:...,vram:64 and it said

Jan  1 16:14:20 JLaptop vesafb: unrecognized option vram:64

I tried video=vesafb:...,nomtrr and that had no effect on anything that I could tell.
When I just run "startx", twm (ugh) comes up just fine.

I googled some for the dma_intr error, and it seems to either mean nothing or mean the hard drive is going. But for me it only shows up when trying to start gdm... and Debian hasn't complained at all. Plus the laptop's only about a year and a half old...

[TruthSeeker]

I backed up my home directory and then ran:
e2fsck -cv /dev/hda6 <--gentoo partition
from Debian, to check for bad sectors. It got about 5/6 of the way through without reporting anything, then slowed way down... I switched to a console and found those dma errors streaming into it, referring to hda6. The scan seems pretty much frozen. I'd been hoping the scan would be able to just mark out the bad sectors... but maybe the drive is just too far gone.

Is there anything else I can try, or should I start shopping around for a new disk?

Thanks...