Well, that was a scare
Jul. 22nd, 2009 00:39![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
torquillWhile watching videos off a DVD with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hopeforyou, I decided to go look up something on the web. My browser folded and wouldn't come back up. So I went to a terminal and typed 'ps aux | grep firefox', to find the errant process and kill it. It gave me a BUS error and died. buh??
After attempting it again, I tried 'ls'. "Input/Output Error." um...
'w', 'uptime', and 'sync' all threw I/O errors. 'dmesg' segfaulted. Urk.
Looks like my hard disk may have died. Well, crap.
I sighed, then decided we might as well finish watching the episode (the system ran fine as long as we didn't try to run new commands or access the disk). It behaved until I packed it up and took it home. I tried to shut it down, it (predictably) failed, and I took it down hard with the expectation that it wouldn't come back up. Trip to Fry's in the morning...
I booted it to see what would happen. And.......
It loaded as though nothing was wrong. I logged in. It behaved normally, and still is. Combing through the logs showed nothing from before I rebooted (figures)... but during boot time, I caught it scanning two areas of memory for "low memory corruption". A search on the web, and careful reading of the log, revealed that the symptoms were most likely from low-register, dedicated system memory getting corrupted, which is why basic commands failed but the rest of the system (on higher registers) ran fine. The best part: it's a software issue, probably related to a sloppy BIOS, not hardware at all.
My computer is fine now, and likely to remain so. But what a way to worry me two days after a full OS upgrade!
hopeforyou, I decided to go look up something on the web. My browser folded and wouldn't come back up. So I went to a terminal and typed 'ps aux | grep firefox', to find the errant process and kill it. It gave me a BUS error and died. buh??After attempting it again, I tried 'ls'. "Input/Output Error." um...
'w', 'uptime', and 'sync' all threw I/O errors. 'dmesg' segfaulted. Urk.
Looks like my hard disk may have died. Well, crap.
I sighed, then decided we might as well finish watching the episode (the system ran fine as long as we didn't try to run new commands or access the disk). It behaved until I packed it up and took it home. I tried to shut it down, it (predictably) failed, and I took it down hard with the expectation that it wouldn't come back up. Trip to Fry's in the morning...
I booted it to see what would happen. And.......
It loaded as though nothing was wrong. I logged in. It behaved normally, and still is. Combing through the logs showed nothing from before I rebooted (figures)... but during boot time, I caught it scanning two areas of memory for "low memory corruption". A search on the web, and careful reading of the log, revealed that the symptoms were most likely from low-register, dedicated system memory getting corrupted, which is why basic commands failed but the rest of the system (on higher registers) ran fine. The best part: it's a software issue, probably related to a sloppy BIOS, not hardware at all.
My computer is fine now, and likely to remain so. But what a way to worry me two days after a full OS upgrade!
