Complete Lock Up, where to start?

[theducksfan2010]

You might try the skinny elephant trick. It is a way to regain control of a frozen system.

look at step 5 of this post:
http://lxtips.posterous.com/recover-...ystem-with-alt


Sometimes you can also get to a virtual terminal by pressing ctrl-alt-F1 and then using ps or top to kill the offending process(es), and then pressing ctrl-alt-F7 to get back to your desktop. maybe this trick will let you see what process is causing the problem.

So when I left for Fresno today to go hook up the in-laws computers I just rebuilt (XP) my laptop was doing a update - upgrade in the terminal in Bodhi Linux (Ubuntu based, and had been doing this for quite a while. I just got back to find it all locked up and did the skinny elephant trick from your link to no success, I tried twice. Left wherith no choice but to do a hard kill, and now when try trying to boot it up it starts the load process and then just stays on a blank screen. Am I hosed, or is there anything I can do to try and get this up and running again. No luck in the Graphics Failsafe mode either, although it does progress further with the last 2 lines showing being:

[ 2.779366] scsi 2:0:0:0: Direct-Access Ut165 USB2FlashStoragen0.00 PQ: 0 ANSI:2
[ 2.782181] sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0


I had an update crash in the terminal in Lubuntu 11.10 before and know that there was a command I had to run int the terminal before I was able to use the Synaptic Package Manager again, but I can't get to the Synaptic Package Manager, let alone the terminal if I can't get a desktop (workspace) to load on this again.

The version of Bodhi Linux I am running is built on Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS

Linux Bodhi 2.6.35-28-generic #49-Uuntu SMP Tue Mar 1 14:40:58 UTC 2011 i686 GNU/Linux
Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS

Welcome to Ubuntu!
*Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com/

bodhi@bodhi:~$

[bronquel]

So when I left for Fresno today to go hook up the in-laws computers I just rebuilt (XP) my laptop was doing a update - upgrade in the terminal in Bodhi Linux (Ubuntu based, and had been doing this for quite a while. I just got back to find it all locked up and did the skinny elephant trick from your link to no success, I tried twice. Left wherith no choice but to do a hard kill, and now when try trying to boot it up it starts the load process and then just stays on a blank screen. Am I hosed, or is there anything I can do to try and get this up and running again. No luck in the Graphics Failsafe mode either, although it does progress further with the last 2 lines showing being:

[ 2.779366] scsi 2:0:0:0: Direct-Access Ut165 USB2FlashStoragen0.00 PQ: 0 ANSI:2
[ 2.782181] sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0


I had an update crash in the terminal in Lubuntu 11.10 before and know that there was a command I had to run int the terminal before I was able to use the Synaptic Package Manager again, but I can't get to the Synaptic Package Manager, let alone the terminal if I can't get a desktop (workspace) to load on this again.

The version of Bodhi Linux I am running is built on Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS

bodhi@bodhi:~$

I have two guesses as to why your system is hosed, the first being that the grub loader is messed up (grub doesn't mount the hard drive and point to the kernal), and the second being that your linux install is messed up (kernal or some configuration tied to it). It maybe something else, if the below two things don't work, I'd do a fresh install.

to repair grub do something like this: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1485445 (you maybe able to find a better post than this) and see if that does the trick.

If that does not work, you can try using a live cd to repair the install: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...2&postcount=10

If that doesn't work, I'd probably start dumping what ever files you need onto an external hard drive and then do a fresh install. Hope that helps!

[bronquel]

Found another link that explains more about the "Magic SysRq Key" from which came the skinny elephant trick: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/fix-unr...ard-shortcuts/

I'm going to play around with this more, but it looks like you maybe able to gain control of your system with out a reboot(alt-sysrq-f), or at the very least dump some information to tell you what process(s) locked up your machine(alt-sysrq-w).

[DGINSD]

You might try the skinny elephant trick. It is a way to regain control of a frozen system.

look at step 5 of this post:
http://lxtips.posterous.com/recover-...ystem-with-alt


Sometimes you can also get to a virtual terminal by pressing ctrl-alt-F1 and then using ps or top to kill the offending process(es), and then pressing ctrl-alt-F7 to get back to your desktop. maybe this trick will let you see what process is causing the problem.

I ran into a freeze up of my HP laptop both touchpad and keyboard totally usless. So on my other computer I pulled up this thread and read through, I got to your post and followed the link to the skinny elephant trick. One problem my computer doesn't have a SysRq key so I searched around a bit and found that on some computers it's not printed on the keyboard but the print screen in conjunction with the Alt still functions as the SysRq key.

Went through the process;

Alt-SysRq-R   (Puts keyboard in raw mode so kernel can receive commands)
Alt-SysRq-S   (Puts the hard drive in sync)
Alt-SysRq-E   (Stops all running processes)
Alt-SysRq-I   (Kills all remaining processes)
Alt-SysRq-U   (Unmounts the file system and mounts it in read-only mode)
Alt-SysRq-B   (Reboots the system)

Worked like a charm, thank you for that.

This freeze up occurred using Unity not Gnome shell, so that leads me to believe the issue lies with the base of the system not with a particular desktop environment. How can I troubleshoot this issue to eliminate it?