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Laptop freezes sometimes when Debian Lenny starts

MichaelKMichaelK Posts: 20
in Debian

Hi,

the title of this post is nearly all information I can give you.

Sometimes when I boot my laptop with Debian Lenny the screen turns black when the X server starts and then the laptop freezes. No keyboard interaction works any more (e.g. I cannot kill the server or switch to any tty). I have to restart the laptop using the on/off switch and try again. Normally the second time works fine.

Maybe you can give me some solutions for this error or some hinds how to debug this. I have no idea how I can track the error because everything crashes before I can do anything.

If you need any more informations I can obtain from a normal (not crashed) run just let me know.

Thanks a lot and best regards,

Michael

Comments

  • Goineasy9Goineasy9 Posts: 1,116
    A black screen at that point is usually caused by a malfunctioning graphics driver. Maybe you should tell us what video card your using, and how you set up your graphics driver.
  • mfillpotmfillpot Posts: 2,180
    I am leaning towards a hardware crash because even if the graphics driver is hosing the xorg file it should roll back to the CLi, the lack of interaction capabilities is saying that something deeper is malfunctioning.

    Michale,
    Have you tried hitting Ctrl+C when if freezes to see if you can kill he running process?
  • MichaelKMichaelK Posts: 20
    Goineasy9 wrote:
    A black screen at that point is usually caused by a malfunctioning graphics driver. Maybe you should tell us what video card your using, and how you set up your graphics driver.

    Sorry, of course I should tell you how my system looks like (just forgot that): 
    $ uname -a
Linux kiwi 2.6.28-1-amd64 #1 SMP Thu Feb 19 03:12:18 UTC 2009 x86_64 GNU/Linux

$ lspci
[...]
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)
[...]

    I am talking about a Acer Extensa 5630 notebook. There is a second monitor (Acer AL1916) on a port multiplier. I attached my xorg.conf to this post so you can see my configuration.

    mfillpot wrote:
    I am leaning towards a hardware crash because even if the graphics driver is hosing the xorg file it should roll back to the CLi, the lack of interaction capabilities is saying that something deeper is malfunctioning.

    Michale,
    Have you tried hitting Ctrl+C when if freezes to see if you can kill he running process?
    I am not sure if there is some hardware crashing. As far as I can remember, the error never occured when I am running Debian without the port multiplier and the second monitor or when I ran Windows Vista (with or without second monitor). But maybe the port multiplier has a problem and Vista works for any unknown strange reason.

    I did not trying hitting Ctrl+c but I will do the next time the error occurs. Do you have any more ideas, I can check when the error occurs again? Unfortunately I cannot reproduce the error, I have to wait for its random occurence.

    Thanks a lot and best regards,

    Michael
    [file name=xorg.txt size=3630]http://www.linux.com/media/kunena/attachments/legacy/files/xorg.txt[/file]
  • MichaelKMichaelK Posts: 20
    Hi,

    yesterday the problem reappeared. I used my laptop over several weeks without the docking station/port multiplier and had no problems. Yesterday I put it on the docking station and had to boot two times bevor X came up properly.
    Pressing CTRl+C or CTRL+Shift+Backspace did not had any effect.

    So any ideas out there?

    Thank you very much for your help.

    With best regards,

    Michael
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