Hibernate or spin down or hard shutdown causes errors

[jackheart]

Transcending beyond Newbie here.

Maybe somebody could point me in the right direction. I have been having issues with disk errors and having to press f to fix errors during startup or having to run fsck on a live CD. It seems to happen whenever the computer goes into a mode not regular from shutting it down. I have not quite tested it but I suspect it is from one/a few/all of the following:

-hibernate. (not tested fully)
-Suspend (just had this happen the other day, caused errors
-Spin down disk whenever possible (Had my computer on for a while, did not enter Suspend or hibernate, but had errors on next startup after this)
-Hard shutdown, as in, I hold down the power button until it shuts down. (Have had to do a few times when I went into Alt-ctrl-F2 and it kept saying ata errors and would not let me login. Before this last install, I had to do this a lot when I had ext4...dont know if that is related)

here is what I am running:
Acer 5251-1513 Laptop.
AMD V120 2.2ghz 64bit.
HD: Toshiba MK2564GSX ATA 250GB. (partion: ext3 / 50gb; ext3 /home 192gb; swap 8gb)
Ubuntu 10.4 LTS 64bit

Any help would be greatly offered. I wonder if it is because of the 64bit? If that is a possibility, or probability, I may just switch to the 32 bit version, or another distro. For now I have been diligent in not letting any of those things happen, I know how to disable them and just have to watch my battery/shutdown if I know I will be away long.

[jayd512]

Hi there!
I've actually run into this issue on my Acer lappy a few times...
I find it to be pretty much distro-specific.
Fedora runs like a dream on it, but will give the occasional error when waking from suspend.
Mint has a few little issues during normal operations, but never balks at waking.

Looking at your logs and the tail-end of dmesg will most likely give you a clue as to what is going on.

[zenwalker]

Transcend further and try salix! Stick with 32-bit unless you have 4GB RAM or more. Best wishes

[jackheart]

Jayd512: Thanks again for the help. trying to decipher dmesg is going to be a fun project! Serisouly, I am way into learning about the ins and outs of Linux. When I run it I can see the lines for the ata drive, I just need to know how to read it, though I do see a few lines that have something in them saying "error"

zenwalker: Salix looks interesting, do you know if their is a gimp package for it? I will continue my research.

[jayd512]

If you're seeing anything listed with ERROR attached to it, that would be your new focus
Usually, though, you will want to also look at the 2 or 3 lines above it. That way, you may be able to catch some info on what actually leads to the failure.

If you're getting a specific error, though, you can post it here and maybe somebody will have some detailed help with it.