Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Locks Up but Windows 8.1 Doesn't

[rmoenck]

Hello Ubuntu Forums,
My (fairly new) PC randomly locks up when I am running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
When I say 'locks up' I mean the screen freezes, there is no response to mouse or keyboard and the only resolution is to power down.
The 'lock up' is random in that it can occur at any time. Sometimes even before the login prompt appears.
Sometimes it can run for an hour before it locks up.
I suspect flakey hardware except that when running under Windows 8.1 (it is a dual boot set up) it doesn't appear to do this.
As a long time Linux User this really frosts my socks because I have to put up with all the 'software deamons' that jump on you when you run windows these days.
The basic hardware configuration is an ASUS M5A99X R2.0 AM3+ with an AMD FX-8350 cpu.
I bought it with the hope it would be a hot-rod but so far it is just a source of frustration.
Since this is a multi-processor situation I wondered if the threading is getting tangled (just a thought).

Any advice you might have would be welcome.
Thanks,
Bob Moenck

[Mark Phelps]

It could also be video drivers. Please post info on your video chipset. IF you don't have it, open a terminal in Ubuntu, enter "lspci", look for the line containing "VGA" and post that info back here.

[3rdalbum]

Another possibility is bad RAM. Windows uses RAM a bit differently to Linux - it reserves up to 2 GB for the operating system and then barely uses any of it - so it's possible that the bad portion of RAM could cause problems in Linux but not in Windows.

Theoretically, it could happen vice-versa too - everything okay in Linux but random crashes in Windows.

I recommend running Memtest86+ for eight hours. If the computer crashes or it displays error messages, then you have bad RAM. Even if everything passes, you might still have bad RAM. I found a good way to immediately identify bad RAM is to try running the memory benchmarks from Phoronix Test Suite, they will crash your computer if you have bad RAM.

Also, if you have multiple sticks of RAM in your computer, try removing one of them and see if that helps. If it doesn't help, then put it back in and remove another one, see if it helps, etc.

[at_first_light]

Nice motherboard dude. Some questions:

- Do you have a swap partition?
- How big is your swap partition?
- How much ram do you have?
- What kind of storage device are you using (eg: Nand-flash solid state drive, 7200rpm hard drive, 5400rpm hard drive)?
- Are you using any custom swappiness settings?

[slooksterpsv]

I second Mark's theory in Video Drivers, what kind of video card do you have? I've had that exact issue where not having proper video drivers would cause crashes.

[rmoenck]

Thanks for your advice.
This is what I get.
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Cedar [Radeon HD 5000/6000/7350/8350 Series]

[Mark Phelps]

Radeon HD 5000/6000/7350/8350 Serie

Not good ... almost certainly some part of the problem is video drivers. What with all those differnt Radeon versions, it's possible the default Radeon drivers won't work well.

If Additional drivers offers an fglrx driver to you, I would try that.

But, BEFORE I did that, I would use Clonezilla to make an image backup of my Ubuntu install. Takes only a few minutes to do that, and restoring that working version (in the event of a video driver problem) is a LOT faster than trying to fix the driver problem.

[rmoenck]

Thanks to all for their advice.
I will explore upgrading the video drivers and report the results to this thread.
For those that suggested bad memory,
I ran the grub memory diagnosic for 12 hours (5 passes on the 8 Gb memory) with no errors reported.
There is only one panel of memory so I can't try pulling panels.
Yes, I do have 8 Gb of swap space, but with my current usage only about 2 Gb of the main memory is used
and so swap is never in play.
I will try the Phoronix Test Suite to see if something is reported.

Thanks again for your advice.

[rmoenck]

This is an update on this issue.
I still don't have any resolution.
Some of the things I have tried:
1) I have left the machine running under Win 8.1 for a longer time to see if it would lock up.
It ran for 4.5 days without issue.
Under Ubuntu I rarely get more than a couple of hours and sometimes it halts before a logon prompt.
2) I have tried Phoronix Test Suite but my take on this is that it more of a bench marking tool,
a “My machine is faster than your machine” tester.
I have a problem running some of the Phoronix test suites as the machine locks up before they complete.
3) I did convert to the fglrx video driver but still no joy.
The video card is a Radeon HD 5450 which I take to be a low-mid end video card from a well
known manufacturer. Something that I would hope would be well supported by Linux.


I would welcome any suggestions of other things to try.

[QIII]

The HD 5450 is definitely entry-level, but it shouldn't be giving you this much grief. If you have installed the proprietary video driver and it still fails, let's set that aside as a candidate for the problem for a bit.

Since it is failing before login at times, the driver would not have been in use yet anyway.

Which of the Phoronix tests fail? Those test are worthwhile as more than benchmarks. They exercise your machine and can point out problem areas.

Please run memtest as suggested. Do it over night so it makes several passes.