On Friday 22 April 2005 9:01 am, Clayton wrote:
The computer works fine with no errors, but at random intervals ranging from a couple hours to a week or more it will reboot. No warnings... it's as if someone pulled the power cord out. <snip> I cannot find any warnings or errors anywhere to indicate why I'm getting the reboots.
I'm thinking maybe a hardware problem, but cannot find any indication of what it might be. I've ran memtest and other hardware tests overnight or over a weekend, but all tests came up with perfect passes.
The only thing I can think of is maybe a corruption in my swap partition? Not sure why this would be an issue unless your system is constantly using swap. To check this you could, as root, 'swapoff' for a while ( a week or more? ) to see what happens. If it does reboot while swap is off the reboot will re-enable swap.
Anyone have any ideas or suggestions? Is there somewhere I can look in the OS to maybe get a hint as to what is going on? Or maybe a test I havent thought of? A log file I could look at?
Clayton
Several things that come to mind are heat from dust clogging fans and heatsinks and vent holes; loose connections of hard drive, CD/DVD, floppy drive cables (power and data) that need to be reseated; PCI cards that have become or are poorly seated and need to be reseated; loose keyboard or mouse cables; and other stuff you'd need to power down and open the system up to check. Combinations of software drivers and programs that are bad or in conflict can cause a reboot. Always fun trying to nail those down when there aren't any errors in log files. Sometimes the video display driver can either lockup or cause a reboot. Both Silviu's and Jerry's suggestions on power are excellent. Power supplies are known to slowly lose their ability to maintain correct levels within +/- 10% on the +/- 5V and 12V lines. Gkrellm and sensors programs may show these for you. And again, loose connections that may be intermittent like Jerry's power cord. Stan