[PlanetCCRMA] FC5+P.CCRMA: Various Problems with Stability

[Paul Coccoli]

On 3/11/07, Bill Polhemus <bill@polhemus.cc> wrote:
> I have mentioned previously that I had some "system freezes" (more
> precisely, I think they are "GNOME desktop freezes") in my homebrew AMD
> dual core system.
>
> I want to elaborate a little more, in case this helps others, and
> perhaps to gain more insight into how to proceed.
>
> First, I removed 1GB of the 2GB of memory I had installed. I'm not sure,
> but it seemed like perhaps the ones I removed were a bit "slower" DIMMs
> than the (newer) ones I left installed. I say "I'm not sure" because
> they were sort of "generic" DIMMs without much in the way of identifying
> info. I had picked them up at a computer repair "dive" here locally that
> has since gone out of business, whereas the remaining DIMMs were
> purchased from Fry's Electronics and are "name brand".
>
> The different DIMM types were installed in separate banks, and they
> seemed to interoperate, but they may also have been the source of the
> instability--at least in part.
>
> Since I did that about a month ago, the system ran better, but lately
> I've noticed the "freezes" recurring, though not as frequently. They
> seem to crop up if the system has been idle for a long time--such as if
> I leave it running in the morning and go to work; I often find it
> "frozen" when I get back to it that evening.
>
> Twice now, the resulting hard-reboot to recover from the "freeze" has
> left garbage on the disks that FC5 insists must be cleaned up before
> proceeding. This occurred again yesterday, but this time the system
> refused to boot at all, and claimed all sorts of "hard disk errors" that
> appeared to be unrecoverable.
>
> As I mentioned in a previous post, the HDs are "twin" Western Digital
> 160GB SATA units, that Anaconda set up as a single logical volume.
> Again, these are brand new drives, purchased at Best Buy, and they are
> reported to be highly reliable.
>
> Finally, last night I grew tired of nursing the thing, and just did a
> complete reinstall of FC5 from the DVD-ROM, wiping all partitions and
> starting over again. This time, the system rapidly rebooted into the new
> configuration, and I am in the process today of rebuilding the Planet
> CCRMA system on top of it. I'm not sure if I've fixed what ailed it, but
> so far, so good.
>
> While I was at it, I disabled the onboard audio system (Realtek), so
> Linux only saw the Delta 66 card. Sound came right up.
>
> I'm hoping I can finally get this thing on the road. I've spent a LOT of
> time and money on the "non-computer" aspects of my recording studio, and
> I REALLY need for Planet CCRMA (and my homebrew PC) to start doing its
> share of the work.
>
> Thanks for listening.
>
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I have an FC5 box (old Athlon) without Planet CCRMA installed, and
it's been freezing up lately too.  Like you said, it's during
inactivity, when the screensaver is running.  I haven't tried to
troubleshoot it yet (I didn't have any disk issues after restarting
the box).  I haven't seen it in a couple of days, since I did my last
yum update.

This box as a cheap ATI card in it, using the xorg drivers.  What type
of video/drivers are you using?

I can't think of anything I've done to it that should make it
unstable.  I've barely touched it (my wife uses it for internet
access).