[TriLUG] How would you diagnose "random" system hangs?

Reid Sayre rlsayre at bellsouth.net
Mon May 7 20:45:09 EDT 2007


I have a friend that has a system that just started re-booting randomly.
He thought he had a software problem and asked me to help him figure 
out what it was.

So while I was doing that, the system re-booted itself while it was 
STILL IN THE BIOS. So we opened it up and reseated every card, chip, 
and connector we could get to (RAM, processor, PCI cards, disk cables, 
everything) and put it back together.

That was two years ago and he hasn't had a hiccup since.


Robert Dale wrote:
> On 5/6/07, Andrew Perrin <clists at perrin.socsci.unc.edu> wrote:
>   
>> My home system has been freezing up at apparently random times -- usually
>> when I'm at work, so I come home to a frozen machine that has to be
>> cold-booted. How would you go about checking this out? I've let memtest86
>> run continuously for 24 hours with no errors, so I don't think it's
>> memory. I have the sensors reporting hourly to a log, and there are no
>> temperature concerns (generally between 37 and 40C). There's nothing of
>> interest in syslog that rings any bells to me. Any ideas?
>>
>> The machine is an ASUS A8N-E, nForce chipset, with an Athlon64 dual-core
>> CPU and 4GB of RAM in it. It's running debian etch, but with a
>> home-compiled kernel 2.6.20.7.
>>     
>
> In my case, once it was a power supply, another was the mobo.
> You probably could find someone to load test your power supply.
> Hopefully, you don't run into the second situation.  Luckily I was
> just outside of my house when I heard the smoke detector go off.  Ran
> inside to the smell of burnt electronics and black smoke.  The mobo
> had literally exploded.
>
>   

-- 
Reid Sayre
rlsayre at bellsouth.net

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