rokicki@neon.Stanford.EDU (Tomas G. Rokicki) (04/23/91)
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