On Wednesday 25 January 2006 16:42, Martin Soltau wrote:
Hi together, Hi Carl!
On another note, I was thinking that, since the 'decision' to crash isn't consistent but the timing of each crash *is* (approaching/at the KDE greeter) it might be worth testing a two stage boot: change the default to run level 3 and, after it boots, log in as root and run init 5.
I did that and - do you want to have a guess - the system does not crash anymore.
Hi Martin, At this point, I think it's reasonable to conclude that the PSU {insert an underlying cause here} is unable to cope with the greatly accelerated boot process in SUSE 10.0. It could be getting tired from age... or newly added hardware is demanding too much at cold boot... or a marginal/slow device is sometimes pulling the system down. I think one of these scenarios is likely your problem. In particular, optical drives (DVD/CD) are notoriously high power consumers after cold boots. When old and marginal, they can even pull enough extra current during extended initializations to 'starve' surrounding circuitry during POSTs. If you upgrade (oversize) the PSU to solve this symptom, what usually happens next is the marginal drive finally fails, so you end up spending money on two replacement parts instead of one (plus the time and trouble of a second repair.) :-/ Plan 'A': 1. Pull the DVD drive and test booting directly to run level 5. If the problem goes away, install a known good (borrowed) DVD drive and test again: --> If the problem stays away, replace your DVD drive. --> If the problem returns, reinstall your original DVD drive and: 2. Pull the CD drive and test booting directly to run level 5. If the problem goes away, install a known good (borrowed) CD drive and test again: --> If the problem stays away, replace your CD drive. --> If the problem returns, reinstall your original CD drive and: 3: Pull the high end graphics card, boot to run level 3 and, as root, run SaX2 to configure the on-board graphics. Test booting directly to run level 5. If the problem goes away, reinstall your graphics card and **upgrade the PSU.** Plan 'B': Given that the above testing can be a lot of work and your time may be more valuable, and since the parts aren't prohibitively expensive anymore, you might want to consider just upgrading the PSU and replacing the CD and DVD drives outright. This is not only faster, but you get the benefit of newer features and it removes any lingering doubts about these three items. The down side is the "real" problem could go undiagnosed (no testing) and rear it's ugly head again. Have fun and good luck! - Carl