[linux-audio-dev] [OT] disaster redux

[Thomas Vecchione]

Well unfortunatly there is one other option to consider, highly unlikely 
but possible, especially if you overclock your system.  The symptoms you 
are describing may also point to a damaged chip(CPU) typically when it 
starts having problems caused by periods over high temperature, even if 
it isnt at a high temperature when you have the problem, if it had 
previously been run at high temperatures you could still have the 
symptoms show up because the chip got damaged.  I wouldnt throw out any 
peices until you find out exactly what is wrong though and hope you the 
best.

      Seablade

Brad Fuller wrote:

> Dave Phillips wrote:
>
>> Greetings:
>>
>>  It has not been a good week.
>>
>>  As I mentioned yesterday I swapped my hardware into an identical box 
>> as my original machine. Yesterday everything seemed to have returned 
>> to normal operation. I watched some movies, worked on some music, and 
>> so forth.
>>
>>  Today I powered up the box, logged on to the net, downloaded the 
>> latest Csound CVS and started compiling. After a few minutes 
>> everything froze again, the machine was locked tight as a drum. I had 
>> to pull the plug to restart, but when grub came up my keyboard was 
>> frozen. I pulled the plug again and got my keyboard back after 
>> restarting.
>>
>>  Now I'm running memtest again. I realized yesterday that I'd run it 
>> on only one RAM stick so I thought I'd better check again. However, 
>> at this point I'm starting to suspect a bad drive. But *two* bad 
>> drives in the system ?? As I mentioned in an earlier message, the 
>> machine failure occurred regardless of which drive I was using (RH9 
>> on /dev/hdb, FC3 on /dev/hda).
>>
>>  So I'm bummed again. Looks like it's time to bite the bullet and buy 
>> a whole new system. :(
>>
> Hey Dave,
>
> Obviously, each component that you transfered from the old to the new 
> system is suspect. Drives usually fail miserably, not after a while... 
> though, it's not impossible to suffer a long death. But, when they do, 
> it's usually noticeable upon reboot... but, again, not always (not an 
> exact science!). It's possible that you have a bad area on one of the 
> drives that is used for the swap space and when a critical area is 
> swapped it bombs.
>
> From the thermal pov: Did you bring over IDE or SCSI cards for your 
> drive? If so, you might swap those out. But, it's stretching.
>
> It sure sounds like a memory problem. (note that not all memtests test 
> memory effectively).  Sometimes a memory problem is so small that it 
> doesn't necessarily effect the operation of the computer until later 
> at a random time. If I were you I'd swap out all memory and let it run.
> If you can't swap out the memory, you could try booting up into DOS or 
> BIOS and just let it sit there for a good long while. Just something 
> that wouldn't exercise RAM to eliminate thermal or other parts that 
> you've transfered from the old computer.
>
> brad
>