[GLLUG] desktop freezing??

Sean O'Malley picasso at madflower.com
Thu Nov 29 09:30:33 EST 2007

It sounds like your power supply might not be big enough to handle the
bigger drive. It could be a bad board or bad caps, etc. and stuff that has
already been mentioned.

To throw some other things out on the "possibility" list because they are
"odd" errors.

I had an issue with a series of USB 1.1 cards where one port put itself to
sleep it was after like 30 minutes, and you could be in the middle of
typing something, and just flat out went to sleep. my keyboard and mouse
were connected to it, so basically it felt like the windowing system hung.
By switching the USB ports the keyboard and mouse were it fixed the issue.
It was literally a hardware issue and I had to send the card back. It was
a whole chipset series that was bad which was OEM'd to various venders.
(the black screen maybe because the card went to sleep, the system thinks
it is there and is trying to talk to that device, but it is timing out.)
This might appear if you switched where the usb cables were plugged in
while adding/swapping out the drive. You might try swapping around the

If it isn't enough power to the USB devices, as the USB bus can only
handle 500mA of current per controller, you might try a powered USB hub if
none of your devices are actually powered. Most 4-port usb cards are two
controllers with a two port hub so ports 1-2 use controller A, and 3-4 use
controller B.  If you switched cables around, the current draw per
controller also changed.

Along the sleep issue lines, sometimes drives will put themselves to
sleep. You might be trying to access say a screen saver on a drive that
went to bed on ya and the system can't wake it up. This is a usually a
scsi issue.

It could be memory issue usually those are only consistant errors during
startup on linux, where you are loading programs in memory exactly the
same way everytime. An easy way to test this is to swap memory card slots.
It may not have appeared before because you wen't actually USING that
memory. IE you loaded a driver for a worm drive into the bad ram.  Since
you added a bigger drive, the in memory cache may have increased thus
shifting where everything is/was loaded in memory.

A similar issue is where your drivers are loaded on your drive. You might
be using a "new" driver that was written to a bad sector on the drive.

Most of this stuff shows up in the logs in one form or another.

On Wed, 28 Nov 2007, Michael Rudas wrote:

> Benjamin Cathey wrote:
> > As far as Power Supplies go - the more wattage the better, correct?
> >  The system will only draw what it needs, right?  Or am I remembering wrong?
> Mostly right.  The efficiency and power factor ratings of
> higher-wattage PSs is kinda variable, but differences are (usually)
> minor, especially for quality units.  A 400W PS would not be overkill;
> an 800-watt one would.  I still think the PS is the problem, but check
> the caps, as well.
> > I figured Linux would have a message somewhere if the problem was overheating though.
> It was only a suggestion based on experience.  Linux can't read ALL
> thermal-monitor ICs, unfortunately -- but the BIOS can.
> ~~ Mikey
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