Hang/Freeze during Idle (M2N-SLI Deluxe MOBO)

[geoffrey]

I have been running into an annoying problem.  I have yet to be able to keep my core running for longer than about 8 hours. 

It seems to freeze up during idle periods.  Sometimes I can ctrl-alt-f1 to a command line, sometimes not.  When I am able to exit to command, I see the following error:  hda:  drive not ready for commands.

I have read elsewhere that this may be a problem with the acpi.  I inserted an "acpi=off" line into the grub boot.  When checking my BIOS (a Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe MOBO) the acpi is listed as enabled, and the line is greyed out so there is no immediately obvious way to disable it in bios. 

So, two questions:  1.  Am I on the right track with the acpi stuff?  and
2:  Is turning it off in the OS enough or do I have to turn it off in BIOS as well?

Bonus question:  Does anyone know how to disable the acpi in this MOBO?

[geoffrey]

According to other Ubuntu forums, this problem is relatively common when installing on this particular motherboard.

So, in case anyone else is running into problems with hangs using this MOBO, I will describe what I did to correct the problem.  (or at least I think it is fixed, no hangs in 24 hours)

I updated to the latest BIOS, which is available on the ASUS site.  Then in the BIOS control panel I disabled the HPET.

Next I edited the file /boot/grub/menu.lst in the console using:

sudo nano /boot/grub/menu.lst

in the line:

## additional options to use with the default boot option, but not with the
## alternatives
## e.g. defoptions=vga=791= resume=/dev/hda%
# defoptions=quiet splash

I added:

no acpi no apic nolapic acpi=off irqpoll

directly after the word "splash" (with a space in between of course)

then I saved the changes and rebooted.

Granted this does turn off the powersaving cababilites but I am willing to trade that for a working machine....

[dopey]

I would say your definitely on the right track and that would be the first thing I would check. I've even had that particular issue once or twice.

That being said, random hanging is hard to diagnose. Right now I just discovered that my core is randomly freezing at relatively idle periods because of an electrical problem that I thought I fixed. You have to be careful when you plug in a phone, tv, sip adapter, core system with 5 HD's and an AMD 2.4Ghz dual core processor, Cable modem, Comcast DVR, and regular digital cable box in one outlet... Really, it should be able to handle it as it's not drawing more power than the circuit breaker can handle, but I'm getting some serious feedback or something as it's shorting out the cable modem when the core is on for extended periods of time and the core can freeze after anywhere between 2 - 12 hours. I'm going to have to verify proper grounding and such, again...

My point is there are many possible causes of such things...

[cirion]

I tried setting up VDR on the core, since I'm not able to install it on my MD's.
After installing both my PCI DVB-C cards in the core and setting up the driver I was able to get VDR running...
But I was getting an image only for 5-6 seconds at the time...

What does this have to do with this thread?
Well, the core also started randomly restarting after 2-3 hours...

I found out that if I unplugged one of the cards, I could watch VDR for as long as I wanted. Great! Maybe it is a driver problem... But the core was now randomly restarting after 6-8 hours...

I removed the last card and I had no more random restarts...

Still not sure if this has something to do with this thread?

I bought a new energy efficient 550w power (The old one was 431w).
Now I can have both PCI DVB-C cards installed at the same time and watch VDR for as long as I want.
The Core is not randomly restarting...

So yes I can confirm that random restarts can have various reasons, that are difficult to find