From the look of it, it was coincidental that Ruby was involved. Ruby seemed to be involved because whatever script it was handling was attempting read or write into the bad area. The result... the system
I traced the problem.... a failing IDE hard drive. Here's a little info to close off this thread. paused briefly while it tried to sort out the read/write error. I had ignored the error because of a long term battle I've had with Maxtor IDE drives and Linux. I've never had a Maxtor drive that didn't spew out DriveSeek errors from time to time... despite the fact the drives doing this never actually failed, and passed all diagnostics. This one was doing it too... so I ignored it.. assuming it was more of the same. On a whim I enabled the SMART daemon, and immediately it popped up a warning the the drive was failing. I ran smartctl, and it started throwing out messages about checksum errors on the drive, and loads of unrecoverable errors. As soon as I moved all the data on that drive to another drive and unmounted the drive... problem solved. I only lost one easily replaceable file on the dying drive. I'm assuming the drive is unrecoverable (ie it's not worth risking my data to try and run the Maxtor tools on it and "repair" the drive)... so it's up for replacement in the next week or so. C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org