11 Jun
2005
11 Jun
'05
4:42 p.m.
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
--
Brad Fuller
(408) 799-6124
** Sonaural Audio Studios **
(408) 799-6123 West San Jose
(408) 799-6124 Cambrian
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