I'm having some spontaneous reboots on a desktop machine I built myself,
wondering if anyone could shed any light on what they think the cause
may be.
Here's the spec:
Chip: Duron 600
Mobo:
RAM: 256Meg (9 meg shared with graphics card)
Case: Maplin 300W case
HD: IBM Deskstar 30G
CDROM: CREATIVECD3630E
CDRW: Mitsumi CR-4802TE
Floppy: Bog standard one from old computer
Running Debian woody/testing.
Here is what I have diagnosed so far:
- Reboots are hard and horrible and happen under various kernel versions
(tried 2.4.16,17,18 2.5.4,5,6-pre1,6-pre3) with and without power
management support enabled.
- Reboots occur more frequently under heavy load (was running
distributed.net, stopping it seems to have reduced reboots, but not
altogether. On kernel compiles it dies frequently.)
- It has happened often at 4am, which is odd because cron runs at 6 on
Debian (I think), but I guess it could be updatedb or something
triggering it.
- Sometimes when it reboots, it doesn't boot up again, but all the
lights on the computer (CDROM, CDRW, HD, Power) flicker madly and
there's nothing onscreen. Pulling the power cord out the back is the
only way to stop this. Sometimes plugging it back in instantly allows
it to boot, sometimes a couple of hours are needed.
- Removing the CDROM, CDRW and Floppy from the IDE and power seems to
have no reliability impacts.
- The Deskstar has been replaced once but this time I ran badblocks on
it before partitioning and it gave no errors, so I don't think that's
the problem, and the symptoms of that were very different.
- From lmsensors I can see that the processor is within acceptable
limits (<35 degrees), at least under 2.4.x I can see that, lm sensors
doesn't compile under 2.5.x AFAICS.
I get the impression this is not a software problem, because of:
a) The way it reboots instantly and doesn't seemed to be linked to
crashing or anything
b) The way that sometimes it won't even get to the BIOS.
So I replaced the PSU - but to no avail - same behaviour.
Has anyone had a similar experience with a computer? I guess it must be
the mobo, RAM or chip that's the problem (or even the PSU still), but
any idea which?
The only option I seem to be left with is to transfer everything to
another case and try and eliminate all the components... unfortunately I
don't have too many spare computers lying around, but I could bastardise
my main machine, but I don't particularly want to!
Any help greatly appreciated, if you want any more info, just ask.
Cheers,
Alex
--
ALEX|X3JA
alex@x3ja.co.uk
ICQ: 1523424
MSN: x3ja@hotmail.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.lug.org.uk http://www.linuxportal.co.uk
http://www.linuxjob.co.uk http://www.linuxshop.co.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Thu 07 Mar 2002 - 16:10:56 GMT