news wrote:

> hmmm... my athlon64 hung last night. hard lockup, had to powerfail it.
> of course the screensaver was in powersave mode (kde) so I dunno what
> the desktop looked like.
>
> syslog has nothing, and messages has:
>
> Oct 25 01:48:27 athlin1 -- MARK --
>
^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@ ^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@
>
^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@ ^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@
> ^@^@^@^@Oct 25 07:37:00 athlin1 syslogd 1.4.1: restart.
> Oct 25 07:37:01 athlin1 kernel: klogd 1.4.1, log source = /proc/kmsg
> started.
>
> all that was running was a kde desktop with a console session doing a
> copy to a usb hard drive (IDE drive in removable case) via a smb mount...
>
> the box is about 6 months old and this is probably the first time it's
> ever done that.
>
> I'm more annoyed than anything.. is there anything else I can check
> (dumps?)
>
> I'm not used to troubleshooting failures on Linux boxes... it could be
> hardware, but I dunno, and this box hasn't had a history of that and
> other than the USB drive it's unchanged in months.
>
> Ray

Because of the infrequency of the event, it once only, I would suspect some
sort of power spike throwing the PSU off stride for a millisecond.

Might be worth updating to KDE 3.4.3 from kde.org if it happens again (been
running the non-official Slack packages since it was released, not had a
problem.)