# Tracking down cause of lock ups [Solved]

## Telemin

Hello all, recently (last 8 hours) I have suffered multiple hard lockups of my system which was previously running normally.  These are characterised by a predominantly grey corrupted screen, with no mouse pointer, sound stops playing, magic sysRq key is unresponsive.

The conditions which seem to reproduce this are simultaneously running emerge, rubyripper, and vlc.  I have done this before with no problems but today it seems is different.

My first thought was RAM but having run memtest+ and also used windows inbuilt memory tester I am forced to assume that this is clean.  And I have tried thrashing my system in windows with prime95 and 3dmark which have produced no instabilities.

The other possiblity was overheating but I have tried stressing my system from the console using stress and again found no stability issues.

Could someone please point me in the direction I need to go to hunt down the cause of these crashes as I am thoroughly stumped by this one!

Thanks in advance,

-Telemin-

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## BradN

any kernel or video driver updates lately?   after that i would begin to suspect a video card going bad (try underclocking the card if possible or try replacement), bad card slot connections (re-insert cards), or maybe the power supply is going bad (check voltages with m/b sensors if possible)

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## Telemin

Thanks for the reply!!

Recent kernel update is the most likely culprit I feel.  I was forced to switch from the old ata driver of my cdrom drive to the newer libata driver as udev support for the old driver was removed in the update to udev 154.

I have been getting large numbers of dmesg errors like these but I don't know if this indicates a major problem or just a less than perfect driver.

```

sr 4:0:0:0: [sr0] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE

sr 4:0:0:0: [sr0] Sense Key : Illegal Request [current] 

ILI

sr 4:0:0:0: [sr0] Add. Sense: Illegal mode for this track

sr 4:0:0:0: [sr0] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 10 00 00 01 00

end_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector 64

```

This also makes sense with the fact that all the lockups have occurred whilst using rubyripper.

-Telemin-

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## Telemin

Seems to be sorted now.  The upgrade to gentoo-sources-2.6.34 seems to have solved it!!

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