Random Freezes With Fedora 12 and 13 on i5-750 System - Solution

[William Park]

On Thu, Aug 05, 2010 at 04:36:02PM -0400, CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Ever since February, any of the Fedora 12 kernels have caused random 
> freezes with the system I'm currently using, which has an Asus P755D 
> motherboard (with the latest BIOS), i5-750 CPU, 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and an 
> nVidia 9600GTS (the "s" is for silent - it has no fan). The machine 
> could run anywhere from a few minutes to an hour and eventually, the 
> keyboard and mouse would become unresponsive. The caps or num lock keys 
> had no effect but I could ssh into the machine and do an init 6. I 
> ignored the problem by sticking with the old kernel that worked.
> 
> I just added a few more drives to this machine and figured that as long 
> as I was at it, I might as well install Fedora 13. Even the live CD had 
> the same freezing problem as I had with the newer Fedora 12 kernels so I 
> rebooted and passed the "noapic" parameter to the kernel. The live CD 
> worked long enough that I could install onto the new drives. However, it 
> didn't take long after rebooting from the new drive that the same 
> problem occurred.
> 
> That started a series of trial-and-error runs where I passed "acpi=off" 
> and "noapictimer", one at a time, and waited for the machine to lock up, 
> or not. Neither helped. There was nothing unusual in syslog or dmesg. 
> The KDE clock was still incrementing seconds and on one of the lockups, 
> I was using rsync to copy files from the old drive to the new one and 
> even though I had no keyboard or mouse control, konsole was still being 
> updated and I could see and hear disk activity. I let rsync finish and 
> rebooted.
> 
> This time, I tried installing the nVidia binary driver and managed to 
> get the machine into an unbootable state. Since I had little invested in 
> this installation, it was just as easy to reinstall and install the 
> binary driver right away. This time, the driver installed fine but 
> again, the machine locked up after running about 40 minutes.
> 
> The big clue came when I was typing a response to an email and after I 
> typed the letter "e", it was as if I was holding the key down even 
> though I wasn't. (No, the key wasn't stuck.) I have an IBM PS/2 keyboard 
> and a proper three button Logitech PS/2 mouse. I plugged in a USB 
> keyboard into the machine and the keyboard was working. I have a PS/2 to 
> USB keyboard/mouse adapter so I unplugged the PS/2 keyboard and mouse, 
> plugged them into the adapter, and plugged the adapter into a USB port. 
> I'm typing on the same IBM keyboard that was plugged into the PS/2 port 
> when the freeze happened and I haven't rebooted. Crazy, isn't it?
> -- 

What happens if you plug another PS/2 keyboard/mouse?

-- 
William

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