[mythtv-users] myth box crashed hard...

[Craig O'Shannessy]

On Thu, 11 Sep 2003, Joseph A. Caputo wrote:

> Just out of curiosity, were you ripping a DVD with MythDVD at the time?
> I've had this happen twice while mtd was transcoding a DVD rip.  I would set
> up a DVD to rip overnight, and when I came down in the morning the screen
> was frozen, the network connection was hung and the keyboard was inoperable
> w/the NUMLOCK and CAPSLOCK lights blinking (!!??)  

This flashing is a kernel "oops" or "panic". You should check 
/var/log/messages, after rebooting, if you are lucky, it could have got a 
message out before locking up.

You can compile a serial console, so that you can get the oops message, 
even if it can't get the message into /var/log/messages.

/usr/src/linux*/Documentation/video4linux/bttv/README.freeze

and 

/usr/src/linux*/Documentation/serial-console.txt

You will need the kernel source to compile this option in, and need 
another computer (or possibly a serial printer) to connect to the serial 
port.

Not fun, hopefully you will have some info in /var/log/messages.

Best of luck, I'm getting plenty of Oops's on my KT133 board and am going 
to replace it.

Craig