[MPlayer-users] How to check why mplayer freezes the system ?

[Diego Zuccato]

D Richard Felker III wrote:

> Probably messed up/dying hd then. I've had similar problems before,
> altho they don't lock up the box, but manage to freeze all hd access
> for a while until the drive resets. You might try using hdparm to
> disable multiblock reads, or even disable dma (!!) and see if the
> lockups go away. Of course replacing the hd before all your data goes
> bye-bye is probably a good idea if it does turn out to be the disk's
> fault...
I don't think it's breaking... Apart all SMART factors report "ok", the
drive was brand new (still packaged in its original anti-static bag) -
bought to replace the 10GB that had some hard-to-read sectors (SMART
reported "failure")... Seems it's quite common with Acer TravelMates :-(

BTW, I just played a bit w/ settings. 

# hdparm -c 0 -d 0 -m 0 /dev/hda
->doesn't help.

# hdparm -c 2 -m 16 -d 1 -X 65 /dev/hda
->seems to work better. -X 66 was my default. -X 67 is reported in
syslog as unsafe :-(

Tks for pushing me to a deeper investigation. Hope now I can use
mencoder safely :-)

BYtE,
 Diego.