a strange system crash

[brian_j]

hi,

i just had had a very strange system crash and would be very appreciated if one could give me a hint on where to search the error. i am even unable to point to a software or hardware error, since it is now working fine.

symptoms:

first firefox hanged. i was able to kill it and restarted it. still it would not respond. compiz desktop cube was working fine, however when i switched to another desktop, the desktop vanished with an error message like “unable to access desktop, it might have been deleted” (but i could still switch with cube). my background was then gone, however the screenlets i use were still there but unuseable. i’ve had enough then and restarted X with Str+Alt+Backspace, however it would not restart.

i then switched to TTY 1 and it was full of error messages of X ("warning: display lasted for 0,000X seconds etc). i could not login to any TTY, i just got the message:

/etc/initscript: Input/Output error
INIT: Id “1” respawing too fast: disabled for 5 minutes.

lastly, after a hard reset, the bios hang after the message “checking for USB devices” (should detect an external harddrive). i removed power, switchted it back on. then the CPU-Fan started, but immidiatly went off again. a few seconds later the same thing again. then about 10 seconds the system started without me pressing the power button an is running since then.

what i did prior to the crash:

i’ve had about 20 youtube tabs open, all paused. then i had to switch the batterys in my mouse and had to search for the receiver. while i searched i removed an USB cabel which was plugged in the PC but was not plugged in anything else. when i found the receiver and got my mouse working again, the crash happend.

any suggestions? i couldn’t find anything in the x server logs yet. what other logs could i have a look at?

thanks in advance for your help!

[bcrisciotti]

Hi. I think that you have a problem at hardware level. Two facts: your background has disappeared and the pc will not boot ( fan spinning and so on). The first should mean that the source location of the background image is on more available so problems accessing the hd. This and the symptoms at boot time could be related to , between others, a bad cmos. So try this: open the pc and remove the backup battery if an erase switch is not present. Wait some minutes then reinsert it. Power on and if possible enter the bios setup. There choose to load default settings then save and exit. Hope it helps otherwise you should also check the power supply. If possible try another one. Let us know

[brian_j]

@bcrisciotti

Hi. I think that you have a problem at hardware level. Two facts: your background has disappeared and the pc will not boot ( fan spinning and so on). The first should mean that the source location of the background image is on more available so problems accessing the hd. This and the symptoms at boot time could be related to , between others, a bad cmos. So try this: open the pc and remove the backup battery if an erase switch is not present. Wait some minutes then reinsert it. Power on and if possible enter the bios setup. There choose to load default settings then save and exit. Hope it helps otherwise you should also check the power supply. If possible try another one. Let us know

thank you for your opinion!

i’ve run the a lot of tests, including a lot of games, however nothing happend. i even overclocked my CPU and my graphik card.

so now i am getting the conclusion, that i somehow overloaded my USB-Controller with the unplugged cable. maybe i’ve been staticly loaded and touched the connector. strange