On Thursday 14 August 2003 14:59, Josh Trutwin wrote:
Hello list,
Been a loyal SuSE user for a couple years now and recently bought a used box with the intent to run it as a database server. The seller claims that it ran Linux flawlessly before he sold it to me.
Well, after three complete reinstalls and one hard drive failure, I just cannot get it to stay up. The frustrating thing is that there are never any error messages when it goes down. Actually, it doesn't really go down, it just hangs. No network and no X. Reset doesn't work, holding in the power button for 10 seconds does though to restart it.
Here's what I know:
512 MB memory, 1GB swap, system doesn't seem overworked. I stopped nearly all processes including cron and it still died once.
I had a hard drive failure a while back so I installed on a new drive, then I put the old drive in as a slave (IDE) and zeroed it out. I don't have anything on it, but it is still on the IDE cable, could it be causing hardware problems?
Yes. Unconnect the old drive for a while. I've had problems with drives that periodically lock up the entire machine even when that drive was not actually being used.
I also noticed that the video card fan is not always working. The box has three other fans though. Might try to replace the video card to see if that helps.
Maybe it only works when it needs to, and maybe its just full of dirt and won't turn. Give it a nudge and see if it will start. A new vid card may be in order - get one without a fan. Fans go bad way too often.
Any other thoughts? Let me know what other information will help in diagnosing the problem...
Run an exhaustive memory test on this machine for several hours. You may have ram with intermitant failures. See if you can get lmsensors package working to measure the temp and voltages of the system. If you have a spare power supply hook it up (you don't have to go thru a full install, just cable it in with the cover off for a day or two to see if it still fails). I'm presumeing an ATX power supply and motherboard connection here... Notice the larger capacitors on the mobo near where the atx power supply connects. If any of them have bulgeing ends, and perhaps leakage, that means your mobo is dieing. This is fairly common on slot 1 mobos of a certain vintage, namely just about the time the P3-500mhz cpus came out. Under rated power section on the mobo. Do-Over. -- _____________________________________ John Andersen