15.9. Recovering From a System Freeze

When stuck in a "freeze", your computer will not respond to commands anymore and input devices like keyboard and mouse seem to be blocked. This is a worst case scenario and could mean that you have a very severe error in either your configuration, your software or your hardware. Here we will show you to deal with this annoying situation.

In the case of a system freeze, your top priority should be trying to shutdown your system properly. Let's assume you are under X, if so, try these steps consecutively:

By all means, try to find out what causes these lockups because they can do severe damage to the file system. You might also want to consider using ReiserFS, a journaling file system included in Mandrake Linux since 7.0, which handles such failures more gracefully. However, replacing ext2fs with ReiserFS requires reformatting your partitions.

Notes

[1]

Mnemonic phrase: "Raising Skinny Elephants Is Utterly Boring"


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