I've been plagued by hard lock-ups recently on my smartbook, generally hitting the moment Slim starts, though the exact timing varies (sometimes the login box pops up, sometimes I only see the wallpaper, sometimes I see nothing). On one of the rare occasions that I had the chance to jump over to a different TTY, I happened to catch this message before it froze:
"kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init"
Now I've managed to log in but I can't find anything in the logs. It seems that if I can get past Slim, everything runs properly.

I'm running Debian armhf unstable from wschaub's install script, with his latest kernel, so I understand that I likely cannot receive official support.

From what I'm finding online, this can be a kernel problem, an ssd problem, or a ram problem. None of them sound very appealing but I'm not sure of any means to test them since the smarttop is a bit more closed-off than a typical x86 machine.

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http://www.brandoninvergo.com

I forgot to search the forum before posting. I found these two similar cases:
http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/vi ... f=7&t=2107
http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/vi ... f=1&t=2052

I don't think they apply in my case because they seemed to have the problem much earlier in the boot process and it was consistent. For me it happens after Slim has already begun loading and sometimes it does not happen at all.

The time that I caught the panic message on the TTY, it happened immediately after some wireless messages. I'll try booting without the wireless switched on, to see if that helps (maybe not since I'm guessing the kernel module is loaded anyway), and I'll try that compat-wireless package.

_________________
http://www.brandoninvergo.com

Ok, new error:
That doesn't bode well for the disk...am I out of luck?

Edit: Yeah, lots of ssd errors and weird stuff like not being able to find the "find" command or throwing linker errors. I'm preparing an SD card now to try running e2fsck. I'll update here with info. Pity, my smartbook is less than a year old :(

_________________
http://www.brandoninvergo.com

Ok I reinstalled from scratch and everything *seems* to be behaving. So, I'll provisionally say this is fixed.

_________________
http://www.brandoninvergo.com

Nope, not fixed. The problems have returned.

The symptoms now:

- hard lockups, often accompanied by graphical glitches
- if i switch to TTY1 and wait after powering on, tons of ext4 messages might appear (sometimes)
- on login on TTY1: - something about unmatched quotes in ngetty (I missed it because of the aforementioned flood of ext4 messages
- something about pid 1 respawning too fast (again, missed it)

I'll try installing the stock Debian armhf image (this was with wschaub's installer script) and see how it behaves in the coming days but this is looking like a hardware failure to me. If that's the case, what's the warranty procedure in Europe? I purchased the smartbook back in May of this year.

_________________
http://www.brandoninvergo.com

Just send it back to us. We will review your systgem and ship a new replacement unit if necessary.