Re: [gentoo-user] My PC died. What should I try?

Hi Alex,

...shot in the dark:
Remove as much as possible of the cards, addons, connections etc
from the PC ... make in as much "bare bone" as possible.

Check All coolers (the little ones also) for dust. Remove all
dust even if it is not completly covered with it.

Dont forget the internals of the power supply. Detach all cables.
Remove the power supply. Go outside ;) and blow the dust inside away.

Put the power supply back into the PC again an attach the cables.

Remove all RAM, carefully clean the contacts, insert as less RAM as
possible.

Remove even the HD if it is possible to get into the BIOS
without any HD attached.

Remove the BIOS battery, wait at least a day and insert it again.

Start the PC and go directly into the BIOS. Check the date/time.
If it shows the current date/time, the battery wasn't removed
long enough. Check the battery voltage. Reinsert the battery.
If your board has a BIOS reset: Reset the BIOS.

Then: In the BIOS enter a page which "does something"
(reports continously temperatures for example).

If this is possible, let the PC run for a 
while that BIOS page and see, whether it
hangs again or not.

If all went fine, add ONE component and try it again.
Add the HD at last to sort out hardware from software bugs...

May be one of the components and not the CPU or motherboard
causes the problem and you will be able to identify it by
this procedure...

HTH!

GOOD LUCK!

Best regard,
mcc

Alex Schuster <wonko@×××××××××.org> [12-08-17 09:56]:
> Hi there!
>
> Two days ago, my PC suddenly died, after working fine for half a year.
> I used myrtcwake as usual to suspend to RAM, and it woke up in the
> morning. But after two minutes, the screen went blank and nothing, even
> SysRq, gave a reaction. I tried booting a couple of times again, and
> sometimes it did not even reach KDM. Now, I cannot even run Grub (from
> my USB stick) any more, I only see a "GRUB" string at the top right,
> then nothing happens.
>
> Booting with SystemRescueCD also freezes sometimes. If not, I can make
> it freeze after seconds by running 'memtester'.
>
> Booting good old memtest86 ran for an hour and only found one error,
> then I aborted, removed three of my four memory modules (4GB each), and
> tried different ones in the first bank. Memtest86 again did not find
> much errors, but froze once. Running memtester after booting from
> SystemrescueCD again makes the thing freeze in seconds. It once also
> froze while being in the BIOs setup.
>
> What could be the problem? CPU, board, or even the PSU? I do not think
> it has to do with bad memory. I removed most of the other stuff (hard
> drives, PCI cards). I have no similar hardware so I cannot simply
> exchange things, the question is what to buy and try. How would you
> proceed?
>
> The fan is still working, the cooler does not become hot, and in the
> BIOS there are not high temperatures begin reported. But one thing was
> strange: I updated Calligra from 2.4 to 2.5 (I think), and it took
> ages, at least 8 hours. I thought there may b something strange with
> the build process of this new version, forcing MAKEOPTS=-j1 and such,
> but still this is very long. But when working with it, I did not notice
> anything strange like sluggish reactions, and videos played fine. But I
> did not use it as much as I normally do, and maybe even when overheated
> and throttled down it would have been fast enough for me to not notice
> this. I watch the syslog normally, but maybe I just did not look
> closely that day, I was busy doing other stuff.
>
> CPUs don't just die, do they? Even when overheating, I think these days
> throttle down, so no permanent harm should be done? So maybe it's the
> board? It looks okay, no bent or leaking capacitors.
>
> This is really annoying. Of course most of my passwords are in my KDE
> wallet I cannot access. There's also Wiki, CVS and Git repositories,
> not needed every day, but still important. And the timinig is very bad,
> I just started my new job the day the problem happened, and I do not
> have much time for this now. Before, I was working at home, so I would
> have had all day to diagnose and try things.
>
> It's an AMD FX-4100 Quad-Core CPU, and an ASRock 880GMH/U3S3 board.
>
> 	Wonko
>