After last night’s hang, I resolved to do some testing to see if I need a new motherboard or something.
I booted my computer with a non-smp kernel into single user mode. This would eliminate most “distractions” or other causes for the error. Mounted /dev/hdc1, which is an ext3 file system. I did a simple tar of some of the files on /dev/hdc1, and after about 30 seconds it froze up.
So then I booted with a Mandrake Move CD, which has a 2.4 kernel. I mounted /dev/hdc1 again, and did the tar and it worked. Then I mounted /dev/hdc4, my mp3 collection, and did something that’s frozen up my computer every time since I upgraded:
find . -type f -print | sort > /tmp/mp3.files
It didn’t freeze. Not only that, but my mp3s appear to still be there (although the presence of large numbers of files in /mp3s/lost+found makes me think that some of them will be pooched.)
So now my question becomes – how do I get back to a 2.4 (or maybe a 2.6 non-Fedora) system without incurring another 2 days of downtime and headaches? I won’t be around this weekend, and I don’t particularly want to risk this happening every night for two weeks.
Is there an RPM for a “vanilla” 2.4 kernel under Fedora? Would it be worth rolling your own?
Without wanting to start a distro war, I’m a long time Debian user – from experience, it’s usually very conservative when it comes to hitting the hardware. You will get “stable” hardware support as opposed to “optimised”, with a reasonably selection of kernel images.
Having said that – AHS, ASS. You’re screwed either way.
And I doubt that the thought of attempting the Red Hat -> Debian mindshift before the weekend is very appealing anyway…