[plug] Intermittent hardware problem

[Steve Boak]

On Sat, 18 Dec 2004 01:38 pm, Jim Householder wrote:
> Hi
>
> 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 agree with Craig's mention of the 'dark side' of power supplies. 

From my experience in the land of dodgy mains power, it sounds like several of 
the problems I have fixed by changing the power supply. If you have a spare, 
it's an easy check to swap it in and see what happens.

Power supplies can be intermittent, but probably even worse if the output 
voltages sag to critical levels. If the voltages are already low, the most 
vulnerable time will be when the disk is working hard (and drawing most 
power), which can easily cause corrupted data.

You could also check the SMART data from the drive for errors with 
smartmontools from http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

Steve

P.S. Jim, can you please start new threads with a 'new message'? Changing the 
subject of an existing message still leaves the link with the previous 
message intact, causing anyone who lists messages by threads (like me) to end 
up with deeply nested threads that can be difficult to find. See the snapshot 
below (from Kmail) if you don't know what I mean: 
http://nannupcomputerservices.com/plug/snapshot1.png

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