Distro's hang intermittently... help troubleshoot?

So here are the symptoms which are reproducible every time.

The system will hang performing every day activities such as launching firefox, doing an 'ls' on a directory, running 'top' etc etc.

By hang I mean that you type your command and wait 10-60 seconds for the command to produce a result. Occasionally logging in on the terminal produces similar results

System specs:

What I have tried:

OS I have tried

32 Bit:

64 bit:


I have pretty much exhausted everything that I can think of to fix this. The strange thing is before I converted the "roles" to a media centre (by adding hard drives) This exact computer (save for the ram) had been running Ubuntu 10.10 for many months... I am very confused

Any help would be appreciated.... and no there wasn't anything of use in the logs either

have you tried resetting bios/cmos? Could be a funky setting in there from adding the hard drives (only change you said you made that started the issue).

I'm seeing possibly a hardware situation, not a 'distro' problem. You have 6 hdds, how are you setting them up? raid x, or jbod...etc.


Need more info on your intended setup.

TollhouseFrank said:

have you tried resetting bios/cmos? Could be a funky setting in there from adding the hard drives (only change you said you made that started the issue).

Click to expand...

Well like I said I did reset the bios to the factory defaults

ihrsetrdr said:

I'm seeing possibly a hardware situation, not a 'distro' problem. You have 6 hdds, how are you setting them up? raid x, or jbod...etc.


Need more info on your intended setup.

Click to expand...

At one point I was doing raid 5. However I have since reverted to single drive formation as my raid randomly dumped back in march(ish). This is part of the reason I shredded the drives. I was trying to make sure that any trace of the previous array was in fact gone.

Basically this box has to run FF and XBMC and thats it, its a basic media centre.

As a follow up I installed Fedora 15 64bit LXDE and saw some improvement but not much, the hangs were much shorter and less frequent but still there.

I now believe (after working on it another 5 hours last night) that ihrsetrdr is correct its a hardware problem. I expect the motherboard will die in the near future.

I decided to start turning things off in the bios (such as serial ports etc etc) when I got down to the network, I threw in a TPLink Gigabit card and turned off the onboard network. I haven't had any major problems since.

I guess I shouldnt be surprised. When hardware dies at work and someone looks amazed I always say "its no different then a light bulb burning out. One day it works and the next day it wont turn on... stuff dies"

Anyways in the event that the motherboard goes, does anyone have a good cheap recommendation for an I7 860 mobo?

I would wipe all HDDs with MHDD, with the erase command then run the extended SMART test and scan the HDD by pressing F4.
(then you get scan options) (FYI, MHDD cannot access the HDD with AHCI!)

Report back if you see pauses during the scan with F4.

I've used a few different P55 boards, and the Gigabyte P55 UD3L was the cheapest and best. At the time I paid $60 bucks for it used, and it O/C'd like a champ. If you can find them, P55 boards seem to be pretty cheap.

I'm running an Asus with my 870 right now, and it works great.

Thanks I'll look into the P55 if I can still find them around