Filesystem errors?

[Frank Edwards]

On Sunday 22 October 2006 1:00 pm, "Constantine 'Gus' Fantanas"

--I can tell you your BIOS is ancient.  HP changed the BIOS for this
laptop many times (I wonder why).  Your BIOS should be upgraded to F35
or F37.  I think the newest BIOS is F37, but because there were some
issues with it (I don't remember what), I decided to stay with the F35.
You probably have never upgraded your BIOS, which may be the cause of a
lot of problems.

I want to mention that I'm running the F11 BIOS as well. As HP announced
BIOS changes, I watched the release notes. I never saw anything listed as
a "fix" that had occurred for me, so I never upgraded. I also heard about
people having problems with the intermediate versions, so I was glad I
stayed with what worked for me. :)

However, having said all that, I think the fact that you have two memory
sticks -- that could be different speeds -- could require a BIOS change.
My machine has the original two 512MB sticks. One reason why the BIOS may
have been static for awhile and then upgraded a lot might be that it takes
people awhile before they decide to upgrade the RAM on their laptop, so the
problems don't show up right away...

Having said that, I would suspect a defective IDE controller. :( I have had
3 IDE controllers fail on me over the years, but always in desktop machines
(but not always controllers integrated onto the m/b). The symptoms you
describe are consistent with an IDE controller failure. It could be one
other thing: the IOAPIC. This is less likely, but possible. (The
"Input-Output Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller".) This chip is
responsible for converting hardware interrupts into CPU interrupts. It is
rare for a problem to occur here, but if it does, hardware interrupts can
be delivered to the CPU incorrectly or multiple times (or not at all), and
that can wreak havoc with a device driver.

I heartily agree with the previous post -- which you haven't answered yet --
that suggested running "tail -f /var/log/messages" in a background window
and watch for driver messages. If they come from ide0 (/dev/hda) or ide1
(/dev/hdc), then you've found your culprit. And before you point out that
those are separate controllers: they might not be. Many laptop chipsets
combine the two controllers into a single ASIC, so a single failure could
affect both controllers.

I'm really sorry to hear about this problem you're having. :( It's not very
practical to replace the IDE ASIC in a laptop. :(

Good luck, and I hope it turns out to be something else!

[Ken Hughes]

Post by Frank Edwards
On Sunday 22 October 2006 1:00 pm, "Constantine 'Gus' Fantanas"

--I can tell you your BIOS is ancient. HP changed the BIOS for this
laptop many times (I wonder why). Your BIOS should be upgraded to F35
or F37. I think the newest BIOS is F37, but because there were some
issues with it (I don't remember what), I decided to stay with the F35.
You probably have never upgraded your BIOS, which may be the cause of a
lot of problems.

I want to mention that I'm running the F11 BIOS as well. As HP announced
BIOS changes, I watched the release notes. I never saw anything listed as
a "fix" that had occurred for me, so I never upgraded. I also heard about
people having problems with the intermediate versions, so I was glad I
stayed with what worked for me. :)
However, having said all that, I think the fact that you have two memory
sticks -- that could be different speeds -- could require a BIOS change.
My machine has the original two 512MB sticks. One reason why the BIOS may
have been static for awhile and then upgraded a lot might be that it takes
people awhile before they decide to upgrade the RAM on their laptop, so the
problems don't show up right away...

Just to give a different perspective, I've had my 32-bit R3120Z since
May 2004 and twice upgraded the BIOS, but opted to go back to the
original F03 BIOS. Why? All F11 and later BIOS turned the fans off
until the CPU temp reached a much higher temperature, while the F03
leaves one running constantly. This takes more battery power, but I
found the palmrests too hot to rest my hands on with the newer BIOS.

The only thing that might be a problem is that once I upgraded to 1GB, I
started getting warnings from Linux on boot-up about "Failed to allocate
mem resource #10:***@ea000000 for 0000:02:04.0", which I never
noticed before. I don't know if a later BIOS would fix this, but since
I rarely use the CardBus I haven't worried about it.

Ken

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sun, 22 Oct 2006 20:36:11 -0400

Post by Frank Edwards
tail -f /var/log/messages

OK, I am running that. I'm home now where I will be using the computer
pretty continuously for the next several hours. I'll keep the terminal
window open and check on it from time to time.