Persistant freezes in Mozilla, corrupted files?

[JPsDad]

I'm still a Knoppix-Knewbie, but was starting to feel confident with web browsers and OpenOfficeWriter until today.
My wife ask me to condense,( edit, shrink) a web page. I confidently opened it with Mozilla, brought it into Composer and made the desired snips. I sent to printer and froze. I tried Ctrl-D, Ctrl-Alt-Back, and every other combination that I remembered being recommended. They did nothing. Walked away and a few minutes later, it was at the KDE Login page. Got back to Mozilla and opened the file again, tried to check a table propeties, froze again. Finally had to power off. Next time I tried to open Mozilla, it froze before the window opened. Next boot it went into Mode 5 Text Only.I'm not ready for that, so I tried booting from my 3.6 CD and got an unending list of error messages scrolling by. Is there something like scandisk that I need to run after "shutdown improperly" Should I remove and reinstal Mozilla? If so, how??

I am using a P2-333MHz, with 256MB RAM. I did a beginners HD install maybe a month ago. Does this use any more RAM than a full Debian install? Is it any smaller than running from the CD? Are freezes usually caused by lack of memory? Is there a Task Manager equiv. to Ctrl-Alt-Del that will allow shutting down a process or program that is "not responding" I've been told to read Man kill, but if I can't open a console how can I kill? It's a steep learning curve, but I hate MS Windows' problems.

dad

[foamrotreturns]

You can always open a console unless your system is totally screwed up.
If your GUI freezes, get into a root console on another screen by going to runlevel 3. CTRL+ALT+F3.
Now if you know the name of the process that you think is causing the hangups, do this:
$ ps faux | grep <processname>
it will return 2 lines of info. The first one is the process you're trying to terminate, and the second should be the process of your search. It finds itself, basically. Anyway, look for the first 4-6 digit number on the first line. That should be the PID.
type:
$ kill -9 <PID>
If it says no such process, you picked the wrong number. Keep trying until you get nothing returned. That means the command was successful.
that's how you manage rogue tasks in Linux
Once you have killed the task, make sure you type "exit" to get out of root in that shell. You don't want to leave it running with root in the background.
Now CTRL+ALT+F5 oughta get you back into GUI mode. If not, go back into runlevel 3, login as root and type "reboot"
That'll usually bring your system back happy.

[JPsDad]

I guess my system is really messed up My last couple of freezes would not allow me to open a console - no response to Ctrl-Alt-F3 or Ctrl-Alt-backspace, or even Ctrl-Alt-Del. Had to touch the power button-shut down immediately, no 5 second hold required. Rebooting brought me to a command line login. I can log in as a user or as root, but no GUI. How do I restore my profile?

I tried booting from 3.6 CD, with myconfig=scan. I got an unending scrolling list of errors, citing block numbers, (every fourth one). I finally booted from 3.4CD with no cheat codes and got a working GUI system. Is there a way to reconnect to my configuration that is on my HD?

BTW, The crash seems to have disabled both my CD drivers in my WIN98se partition. Fortunately, they still work with K3b in Knoppix 3.4. I was almost ready to give up on Windows and switch to Linux, but this is a serious setback.

[Markus]

Instead of booting down with the power button you should first try:
Alt-SysRq-s (syncs the hd's)
Alt-SysRq-u (unmounts them)
Alt-SysRq-b (reboots)

Haven't used myconfig so I can't help there.

Did you try unplugging the CD drives and plugging them back in. You could also try to upgrade the firmware in them. That said, I once had to replace a DVD drive after making a typo in a dd command and writing raw data to the drive instead of a hd. Nothing brought it back to life.

[JPsDad]

Markus said:

Instead of booting down with the power button you should first try:
Alt-SysRq-s (syncs the hd's)
Alt-SysRq-u (unmounts them)
Alt-SysRq-b (reboots)

Dad asks:
Is this Alt-PrintScreen or Alt-Shift-PrintScreen? Are The s, or u, or b simultaniously, like a chord?
I tried this on my last freeze and nothing happened. I then tried Num Lock and Caps Lock and neither light on my keyboard changed.( When the computer is alive, they work.)
I beleive that my computer is not seeing keyboard. Maybe my interrupts are not interupting .

After the freeze, it boots to a command line. I can only get GUI by booting CD. Maybe I better go back to a persistent home on hda2?
Am I the only one experiencing these Fatal Freezes??

[Markus]

Umm, where did you get shift from. It's just like I typed. Think about doing Ctrl-Alt-Del, this is the same only with first Alt-SysRq-s then release all and do the same with u, release again and then b instead of s or u. You can wait a few seconds between the commands, especially if you notice the hd spinning while syncing. If the computer is really so frozen that this doesn't help, I suppose a cold boot with the power button is the only option, but cold booting should also be the last option you try.

You could wade through /var/log and see if something of interest can be found in messages, XFree86.0.log or syslog.