[mdlug] hanging machine kernel panic

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Sun, 2012-02-12 at 10:41 -0500, Michael Mol wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 8:34 AM, Garry Stahl <tesral at wowway.com> wrote:
> > On 02/12/2012 07:51 AM, Art Dries wrote:
> >> Almost all kernel panics under Linux are hardware related
> > I had that one Thinkpad 600X that would kernel panic booting Ubuntu in a
> > predicable 15 seconds, but would run anything else.  We never did sort
> > that out.  Version didn't matter either.
> Laptops have notoriously buggy BIOS. Walk through the kernel
> configuration process end to end some time and note all the
> workarounds. You can bet those systems were only tested against
> Windows when they were designed, so it's likely anything that would
> have tripped Windows was fixed. Not a Linux-hating thing, just bad Q/A
> at the design stage.

Try booting with acpi=off, noapic, etc... to see if that makes to
lock-up not happen.  Also try booting into run level 3 [no X] and see if
the machine is stable that way.

Since you have ~15 seconds you might be able to login and disable DMA on
the SATA channels.

Possibly Ubuntu offer's multiple kernels [openSUSE does, no clue about
Ubuntu].  You can switch around the kernels to see if one of them is
more/less stable.

-- 
System & Network Administrator [ LPI & NCLA ]
<http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com>
OpenGroupware Developer <http://www.opengroupware.us>
Adam Tauno Williams