Steps to find the cause of complete freeze?

pampulee

3/29/23, 1:58 PM

The "environment":

I'm runnin a dual boot system; ubuntu alongside Windows. My root is on a separate drive and partition next to windows (SDD), and the home folder is on another drive (HDD) which is also partitioned into two halves. (No problem with Windows since installed, 2-3 months ago)

The story:

Recently my laptop started freezing at random intervals. No matter what I was doing. It didn't matter what programs I was using, it always happened randomly.Sometimes I would go out to make coffee and when I came back it already crashed. My screen would go black, mouse and keyboard unresponsive, SysRQ keys didn't work either. Only solution was to hard reset the computer which I know is not the best way to go. Fresh install of the most recent LTS version of Ubuntu didn't solve the problem. Sometimes I listen to music when this happens, and the sound doesn't really freeze "at place", but rather repeat a 1-2 sec interval of the music. (thought this might help in any way).

The question:

What are the exact steps of identifying the source of a problem like this?

Please bear in mind that I'm a newbie when it comes to Ubuntu or Linux overall, and I really love the system, but I have to find a solution for this. I already tried google and the forums, but mostly the outcome is that "you have to hard reset your computer and that's it", which I'm not really satisfied with.

Thank you in advance!

0 + 0

dual-boot

freeze

crash

waltinator

3/29/23, 2:01 PM

System "freezes" are often caused by running too many, too large programs and running out of available memory. Use `free` to see if you have swap space, read `man mkswap swapon fstab` to create some. Swap space must be contiguous. use `mkswap` or `fallocate`, not `dd`. Traditionally, swap space of 1.5 × RAM has been recommended, but YMMV. If you don't plan to hibernate your system, you can have less than 1.0 × RAM.

Terrance

3/29/23, 2:26 PM

If your system is randomly crashing regardless of what you have running, you may be experiencing a hardware failure. As to what is failing that is something that will have to be tested. You can start with the RAM by choosing Memtest in the GRUB menu. Maybe try booting to a Live USB to eliminate the software on system. If you look out there, there are some open source hardware diagnostics tools that you can run on your system to help you determine what may be causing your crashing.

waltinator

3/29/23, 9:01 PM

After a "sudden shutdown", aka "system crash", and reboot, or an intentional reboot, the terminal command `sudo journalctl -b -1 -e` will show you the end of the previous boot's log's. If there is no hint there, suspect power/ overheating. You can find how I make use of `journalctl` easier at `https://askubuntu.com/users/25618/waltinator`.