How to trouble-shoot when Computer Hangs

[ZenOnza]

hello.. linux experts !

How to solve the problem when Open Suse os gets hung or stops.

My Problem was !
open suse repos was open installing... + music was running in Banshee + Naulitus was open + open office + Mozilla Internet also computer(yast) & Panal's. when i opened an another applicantion Abruptly All got stuck ! Everythig got stopped. the open suse screen was like a statue. nothing was working except
i was able to move the mouse cursour over the screen. Force Quit was also not working from the panel. i was forced to press the Reset button. How to slove this issue... like in windows we generally press (Ctl+Alt+Del) to open the task manger & cancel all the programs or End Task it.

how to get rid this problem ? any suggesstions friends !
thank's in advance !

[mikesd]

I would start looking in /var/log/messages to see what's getting out of control.

[gogalthorp]

CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE will (should) shutdown the GUI.

CTRL-ALT-F1 should take you to a terminal screen.

Once in a terminal as root you can shut down the GUI by

init 3

command

restart GUI

init 5


How much memory do you have and how big is your swap file.

If you hear or see the hard drive ticking it may indicate a bad sector.

[reed9]

CTRL+ALT+Backspace has been deprecated in recent releases. I think for opensuse, it stopped working in 11.0.

[ZenOnza]

thank you
my memory (RAM) is 4gb & swap is 4gb. but some times still open SUSE hangs & stops some of the applications while multitasking. I can try solving the problem using Gnome Terminal Clt+Alt+F1, if you can give me some trouble shooting Guides/commands using terminal if any?

yes ! sometimes i hear the Hard drive ticking for a long time. How to repair/remove the Hard Drive Bad Sectors.

[gogalthorp]

Ok the ticking indicated the system is trying to read a sector which is damaged. This can bring the system to a virtual halt since the OS will try to read pretty much forever. I use a Program called Spinrite but it is not a free program though it is the best I know to recover damaged sectors. Or you can use utilities from your Hard drive manufacture to do low level scan and repair. These are normally free downloads.

Run the utility of choice and if all data can be recovered the world is good. If not you need to run the file system check program to recover and correct the file system. The easiest way is to run the install cd/dvd and select install then repair. You need only run the hard drive/ files system check program. This may fix small problems.

If the file system is damaged too much you need to enter single user mode and run fsck . You can get more info for fsck by typing info fsck at the command line. fsck will give you more info and you may need to run one of the related fsck utilities for the particular file system you use. Note if there is too much damage parts of any damaged files or directories for a partition will show up in a directory called lost+found. You may be able to recover the parts you may not. If the damage is to a program you may need to reinstall it.

Causes can be anything, drive going bad, power failure, notebook bumped or dropped during a write, act of god........

[mikesd]

CTRL+ALT+Backspace has been deprecated in recent releases. I think for opensuse, it stopped working in 11.0.

You have to hit it twice

[D-cat]

Note that if it's the root partition, you're best off running the fsck from a live boot CD so the partition isn't mounted when you run it. This saves potential data loss when fixing.

Assuming ext3:

fsck.ext3 -fcky /dev/sda1

will do a thorough scan of your first partition and update the bad sectors list. Also note that fsck does not attempt to recover data from damaged sectors, it just will avoid writing to them again. You should take note of any discovered bad blocks and find out what files are in those blocks. Move them to another drive (or just delete them) and replace the file with a known good copy after.

If the bad block happens to be in a superblock, you may need to reformat to make it work right again (use the -cc option... slow but write-verifies each sector).

You should also see if you can pull the SMART data... (SpinRite works with this as well). SMART tries to dynamically reallocate spare sectors in place of bad ones until the spares are used up. This means in most modern hard drives that once the user starts seeing bad sectors, the hard drive is already rapidly approaching the end of its useful life. SpinRite can help get some extra time out of it as-is (one of the best products ever made IMO), but you still need to keep in mind that no software can permanently avert an eminent hardware failure.