[SOLVED] System randomly hangs shortly after startup

Question

First of all: hi everyone, as of last weekend I am a brand new Arch user
My problem: I installed Arch on Friday and had no problems with it all weekend, but on Tuesday the whole system suddenly started freezing within a few minutes of being switched on. My cursor stopped blinking, mpd output stopped, and nothing would respond. It didn't matter what I was doing at the time (mostly I wasn't doing anything, or was typing a command). It didn't matter if X was running, or what daemons were running (I disabled all of them eventually). Sometimes I hadn't even logged in yet (although the fault never occurred before agetty popped up). The timing was unpredictable but it always happened within a few minutes of system startup. I could see nothing in the output of dmesg, or in any system logs, that would indicate any problems. The fact that nothing had changed over the weekend, coupled with the unpredictable timing of the fault occurrence, led me to assume it was a hardware fault. However, I had three other operating systems on the same hardware and hard drive (Gentoo, Debian and Windows XP) which all were unaffected. I did an fsck on the Arch partition but there were no problems found, and the smartmontools didn't show any cause for concern either.
Eager to get past the problem, I reinstalled Arch on the same partition, erasing everything I did over the weekend. Freshly installed, with nothing installed besides the base and base-devel packages, Arch still hung just after startup even before I'd finished creating my user account. (Interestingly, the installer never suffered from the same fault.) Still thinking it could be a bad sector or something, I installed Arch on first the Debian, then the Windows partition (who needs either of those, right? ) but neither gave me a problem-free system.
Essentially my problem is this: Arch will no longer work when it is installed or run on the exact hardware that I installed and ran it on over the weekend, even though other distros can run quite happily on the same hardware! Does anybody have any ideas? I've been bitten by the bug now and don't feel right going back to Gentoo!
Last edited by mutantpineapple (2009-12-18 12:47:01)

Answer 1

update:
by installing using the old packages on the cd rather than downloading the new ones, i was able to get a working system again. however when i did a pacman -Syu the problem returned. through trial and error i found that the problem package is kernel26 (or the modules). for whatever reason, i'm having to stay with 2.6.30 for now. is this a bug with the kernel26 package?