I have a Compaq Evo N600c laptop which I've been running debian on for a year or two. Other than some quirky behavior on suspend, it's worked fine. Recently it started occaisionally kernel panicking when I leave it on a soft surface turned on overnight or so. I figured this was probably heat. The last time it did this however, it wouldn't boot up again. It would get to running ntpdate (which I expected to fail due to lack of network connection) and just sit there forever. I tried booting with init set to /bin/sh. I could run one command but would never get the prompt back, even if the command was ls. I then figured out that if I made my one command "bash" I could then run other stuff under bash. However, occasionally I'd run something (even something mundane like ls) and it wouldn't return me to a prompt. I tried running memtest for several hours and it didn't find anything. I booted from a redhat rescue disk and mounted my drives. Same deal. Periodic strange behavior from processes that seem to just get stuck. (such as running sshd, having it exchange some info with the other side and then just stop responding to it). I tried "while /bin/true; do ls && sleep 1;done". That just keeps running, but I can't stop it. I finally booted redhat's rescue cd, didn't mount my drives (so I know they can't be the issue), and ran python2.4. I tried ctrl-c and got no response. Same for ctrl-d. The c char on the keyboard works, and ctrl-c got me out of python. I've tried backgrounding a sleep 500000& and using killall on it. That works.
Any idea what's going on here? It almost has to be hardware failure,
but I can't begin to figure out what. It's a work laptop, so it's not
really my problem to fix, but I want to know what's going on. (And
whether I can find a way to freshen up my backup before delivering the
laptop to someone who may wipe the drive.)
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