HOWTO restart your solidly frozen linux
September 13, 2007
so here’s the case, your screen won’t respond, you tried waiting, but nothing happened. Ctrl + Alt + Backspace gave up on you, it won’t work. Here’s what you’d want to do to softly restart your system without breaking anything, it’s fairly dangerous to restart your machine especially when it’s still trying to do something, like writing to memory or stuff. so try this.
hold down Alt and SysRq (print screen), then type in these letters REISUB. this will turn off your services, terminate all programs, and unmount your drives, then your machine will restart.
Fosswire said you should remember the keys as Raising Elephants Is So Utterly Boring.
January 20, 2008 at 2:16 pm
alt print-screen just screencaps the active window for me, which i believe is the default behavior. Do I need to turn this off first?
January 21, 2008 at 1:35 am
ah, so long as you keep holding down the two keys, it doesn’t matter that the screenshot dialog comes up. This is really useful.
Just a quick question though: on my computer, the effects are visible as soon as you start typing the R, and as soon as I hit the B it powers off (i.e. much faster than shutting down). So do I need to give it time between each keypress?
January 21, 2008 at 8:41 am
malachi is right about the screenshot dialog.
but about giving time between each keypress, i’m not sure about that, but if you want to be sure, you can give a bit of time before hitting B at least, i’m pretty sure the previous letters can work simultaneously not unless it’s shut down.
March 31, 2008 at 8:58 pm
Yeah, I killed it with the power button and my system’s fried. It will no longer boot.
any suggestions?