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From: rokicki@neon.Stanford.EDU (Tomas G. Rokicki)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Interesting night
Message-ID: <1991Apr22.191130.11577@neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 22 Apr 91 19:11:30 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Ca , USA
Lines: 24

The other day, my machine froze solid.  Each time I rebooted, the mouse
pointer would freeze solid somewhere in the boot process.  I was sure
my hard disk was gone.

No panic, no nothing, just a solidly frozen cube; command tilde tilde
didn't even work.  (Or is thiat command command tilde?)  Anyway.

I found a boot optical, and managed to get the machine to boot from it.
I mounted the hard disk by hand and frantically `saved' as many files as
I could.  I fsck'ed the disk (successfully).  Tried to boot from the
hard disk---same problem.

To make a long story short (too bad I couldn't do the same for the night),
it turned out that there was a PostScript file in the lpr queue that froze
the machine solid.  On every boot, after the lpr daemon started, this file
would be `printed'---and lock up the machine.

Once I figured out what was happening, the fix was easy---boot with the
printer detached and clean out the queue.

Maybe this story will save someone else a long night.  Maybe I should have
known.

-tom