Red hat workstation crashes

[shivu]

Dear All,
I m new to this forum but in great need of your help..
I work on Dell workstation with Redhat5. It was working fine for last 2 years but now a days when i leave it overnight, it doesnt resume and kind of hangs and i have to forcefully switch it off, so all the programs which are running are closed forcefully. Also today the web browser, file browser etc were crashing and hanging as it occurs in windows, and ultimately become senseless and again i have to switch it off, my entire work is on that system and i m trying to take backup. Someone please help on this. Is this due to some virus ? should i install some antivirus ? Please help.

[arespi]

I am just guessing here , but it seems more like a hardware problem, I would check the CPU Fan, the memory and the hard disk. Dell usually have some good diagnostic utilities. At boot press F12 and select "Diagnostics".

Good luck

[shivu]

Dear Arespi,

Thanks a lot for your help, I ran diagnostic checks, and it has passed all the system and memory diagnostic checks.
How can i detect the hardware problem, or hard disk problem. Please help if you have some suggestions.
Thanks a lot

I am just guessing here , but it seems more like a hardware problem, I would check the CPU Fan, the memory and the hard disk. Dell usually have some good diagnostic utilities. At boot press F12 and select "Diagnostics".

Good luck

[atreyu]

I good place to start is by looking in /var/log/messages - that file is a running log that contains kernel messages and (sometimes) output from userland processes.

If you suspect your graphical display to be the problem, you can check out the log for it - typically found at /var/log/Xorg.0.log.

[Rubberman]

I would boot from a live/recovery CD/DVD/USB drive and run the badblocks command on the system disc. Alternative, open the Disk Utility or SMART tool and see if it has detected/relocated an excessive number of bad blocks. This is a common cause of this sort of problem - a system disc going bad. I monitor my drives on a regular basis. I noticed that one of the LVM discs where /home resides was starting to get more and more bad blocks (using the SMART interface in the Disk Utility), so I backed up the drive and replaced it after restoring the original data to the new device. No problems! I fortunately caught it before it exceeded the drive's spare sector capacity (just).

[shivu]

Dear All,

Thanks for your replies, those are really thoughtfull, but now my hardrive has gone. System is showing that it is not able to find out any bootable device. So, this means that hard drive has crashed. Rubberman has given a very useful suggestion and will keep in mind next time.
I just want to ask one more thing, that how to distinguish if hard drive has gone or there could be a problem due to operating system. Sorry for asking these silly questions, but i m new to this, so any help will be highly appreciable.

Thanks again,,,

[Rubberman]

From your description of the symptoms this must be a drive problem. Not uncommon, unfortunately. I had a Seagate 1.5TB drive go south recently. It had some bad sectors, but not increasing numbers of them (not uncommon for running drives). Then one day I shut it down and when I restarted it, it would not start up - just clicking sounds. Fortunately it is still under warranty so I can get it replaced/refurbished from Seagate, although the data is likely gone into smoke...

[atreyu]

how to distinguish if hard drive has gone or there could be a problem due to operating system

Like rubberman said, surely a disk problem. But you can make sure, if you like, by booting w/a Linux CD and going into rescue mode. Then simple look for the disks:

fdisk -l

The above command should show the partition tables of attached drives.

Running this command will display any errors the kernel is experiencing (e.g. with bad drives)

dmesg

This smartctl command will display the health of the sda drive:

smartctl --all -H /dev/sda