RE: random crashes

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



> Well, yes, it can be a hardware failure, but then it's a
>rather strange coincidence that the crashes started
>happening immediately

I do IT for small businesses, and I fix just these sorts of problems. And I
can tell you from experience - these kinds of coincidences happen fairly
often.

In any case, it always comes down to software or hardware, or both. The
hardware is easy - just follow these steps:

1) Open the case and look for stopped or slowly turning fans. Including: cpu
fans, case fans, and the fans inside the PSU.

2) Clean dust from the cpu & video card heat sinks if necessary.

3) While looking in the case, look for bad capacitors on the motherboard and
inside the PSU. Click on the pictures to see close up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

4) If you're using two or more sticks of ram and the sticks are mismatched,
try buying matched pairs. Also, look at the sticker on the ram and see if
they require that their voltage be set higher than normal.

5) Inside the PSU, look closely at the mid-sized capacitors where the
external wires are soldered to the circuit board. (external wires meaning
those that connect to the mainboard and drives) Also, look at the PSU
circuit board and its components for indication of high heat. For example,
brown areas on the circuit board indicating that something is getting too
hot. Components like resistors and rectifiers can get too hot and burn the
area around them. Sometimes you'll see black charring where a component has
caught on fire. There are no dangerous voltages inside the PSU as long as
the power cord is unplugged from the wall. But be sure to unplug from the
wall, or you will learn quickly never to do it a second time.

6) If everything looks good so far, put it all back together and run
ramtest86+ for a few passes. The more the better.

7) Boot a live cd and read the smart data for the drive(s): use the gnome
disk utility (palimpsest), or use smartctl -a /dev/sda, etc. (substitute
your actual device) If Reallocated Sectors is more than 0 (zero) the drive
is failing. This counts confirmed sector read/write errors. The sectors are
disabled by reallocating them. As new bad sectors occur, the computer can
freeze or reboot, or programs can crash.

Of course, even if your system passes all those tests, there can still be a
bad mainboard or other part.

But if it does pass all that, look seriously at your OS - it could be
software problem.




-- 
users mailing list
users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe or change subscription options:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users
Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines

[Index of Archives]     [Older Fedora Users]     [Fedora Announce]     [Fedora Package Announce]     [EPEL Announce]     [EPEL Devel]     [Fedora Magazine]     [Fedora Summer Coding]     [Fedora Laptop]     [Fedora Cloud]     [Fedora Advisory Board]     [Fedora Education]     [Fedora Security]     [Fedora Scitech]     [Fedora Robotics]     [Fedora Infrastructure]     [Fedora Websites]     [Anaconda Devel]     [Fedora Devel Java]     [Fedora Desktop]     [Fedora Fonts]     [Fedora Marketing]     [Fedora Management Tools]     [Fedora Mentors]     [Fedora Package Review]     [Fedora R Devel]     [Fedora PHP Devel]     [Kickstart]     [Fedora Music]     [Fedora Packaging]     [Fedora SELinux]     [Fedora Legal]     [Fedora Kernel]     [Fedora OCaml]     [Coolkey]     [Virtualization Tools]     [ET Management Tools]     [Yum Users]     [Yosemite News]     [Gnome Users]     [KDE Users]     [Fedora Art]     [Fedora Docs]     [Fedora Sparc]     [Libvirt Users]     [Fedora ARM]

  Powered by Linux