[plug] Intermittent hardware problem

[Craig Ringer]

On Sat, 2004-12-18 at 13:38, Jim Householder wrote:

> Over the last month or so it has been spontaneously rebooting from
> time to time.  Now as likely as not on reboot it hangs after
> displaying the PCI device listing and before the "Verify DMI pool
> data..." message.  A reboot at this point ususally works.

It's safe to say it's a hardware problem ;-)

It sounds to me like it could well be a cooling problem, especially if
it's more likely to fail to boot correctly after a reboot than after a
cold boot. Otherwise, you could have a loose PCI card, intermittent PSU
fault, etc.

My attitude with this sort of hard-to-pin-down problem is that it's
mostly not worth the time and stuffing about (and the new parts) to
repair the thing when replacements are so affordable. Frankly, I'd just
buy/build a new system and image my disk across. If you don't like that
idea, it's probably also reasonable to buy new CPU+Motherboard+RAM and
drop those in (plus, perhaps, a new PSU just in case), though that way
you risk damage from say a damaged video card.

--
Craig Ringer