I've been having a similar problem (rather rarely) on my system as well. I've
got 1.2.10 running, and my entire Linux filesystem is mounted on a single
partition (about 200 Mbytes, I've considered repartitioning to give Linux
more, and OS/2 Warp less space, but thats another story.) The drive is a WD
540 "Caviar" drive, (the device is /dev/hdb5, in case that matters). Every
once in a while, some process will try to access the /var/adm directory, and
for some reason die (enter uninterruptable sleep). When this happens, the
HD makes a strange noise, similar to being powered up for the first time. (My
PC is a desktop, so the HD should not be spinning down for any reason...) It
may be hardware trouble, it may be something Linux is doing, I dunno. At any
rate, ANY process which tries to access this directory (/var/adm) gets put to
sleep. syslogd is usually the first to die, but init soon follows. Any
process which terminates after, instead of dying gracefully, becomes a
zombie. And
shutting down properly with a hung init process is a pain... :) I end up having
to give the computer the One Fingered Salute (shutdown hangs when trying to
kill off these hung processes), and pray when I reboot and run fsck.
As I said, it MIGHT be a HD problem (can anyone reccommend a good utility to
analyze the media of the HD non-destructively? BIOS has a media analysis tool,
but it erases everything). However, if the hardware fails, I don't think the
correct way for Linux to respond is to cause processes to hang. Anyone have
any ideas?
Thanks,
Scott