Re: Hard drive crashed!!

[John Utz]

Hello;

        This would not really be an octave problem per se, this could have
happened with any other swap intensive operation, i would expect.

        I assume u are running linux. This might be an important thing to
mention on a linux mailing list, because this is more a kernel problem
then an application problem, IMHO.

        I used to have a problem where i would get a memory leak when i
did a lot of plotting from octave with gnuplot. It wouldn't crash my
machine tho, it would just run out of swap and kill octave and gnuplot.
That problem seems to be gone now, fwiw. ( this was on FreeBSD
2.1.5-RELEASE, with a 386/387 with 12meg of ram )

just my us$ 0.02

john


On Fri, 14 Mar 1997, Lynn Chen wrote:

> I ran 3 octaves in X windows last night. The next day, I found the
> program half finished with messages saying program error. Then I reboot
> the system and it won't reboot. Kernel panic. Ran fsck.ext2 to fix
> the drive, there are unrecoverable errors.
> 
> What happened could be that the memory (16m) ran out and it did a lot
> of disk caching and crashed the disk.
> 
> After fsck failed, I decide to reinstall Linux, all the partition
> informations are still there, but when I try to format the swap 
> partition, it would run forever (> 10 mins) with some occasional
> cracking
> sound ( not the usall noise from WD drive). I then downloaded the
> Western digital WDDIAG.EXE, it stopped saying error exceeded maximum.
> WD rep said if the error is <10, then low level format it.
> 
> Just let you know I learned the lesson the hard way. I would not run
> more that one copy of octave at the same time any more.
> 
> guoqiang
> 

*******************************************************************************
 John Utz       address@hidden
        idiocy is the impulse function in the convolution of life