[plug] Intermittent hardware problem

[Alex Nordstrom]

On Sat, 18 Dec 2004 06:38, Jim Householder wrote:
> One of my machines has a problem.  2.6Ghz Celeron, MSI all-in-one
> M/B, 256MB ram, new hdd.  hdd was purchased yesterday, the rest last
> March.  CDRW is 4 years old and DVD reader is 3 months old.  Cables
> and power supply are 4 years old.
>
> 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.

I love hardware errors like this. Always hard to pin down, and it takes 
weeks after you believe you've solved it until you can finally feel 
confident that you actually have.

I bought a second-hand desktop with the known problem of random reboots. 
Being aware of the MS Windows viruses that were particularly active at 
the time causing just that, I hoped that it was a software problem, but 
luckily paid a cautious price for it in the event that it wasn't.

Over the next weeks, I tried to pin down the problem by reducing the 
computer to the lowest common denominator. Knoppix is really useful for 
this sort of thing. I gradually ripped out everything except CD-ROM 
(for Knoppix) or the hard disk drive, either of the two memory modules, 
motherboard, processor, and graphics card. I also tried a different 
PSU.

Since the reboots could be days apart, it took quite a while to isolate 
the problem, but eventually I concluded it was either the processor (a 
600 MHz Celery) or motherboard (can't recall a name, if I even saw one; 
lots of on-board functionality for new and exciting failures), and 
after replacing them, I've had no problems.

Bottom line? This type of problem is tricky. My advice is to 
troubleshoot by eliminating or swapping out components. Knoppix or 
other live distributions are good tools for avoiding hard disk drives 
which can cause a number of interesting problems.

-- 
Alex Nordstrom
http://lx.n3.net/
Please do not CC me in followups; I am subscribed to plug.