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

[Dale]

Alex Schuster wrote:
> 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
>
>
Just my two cents here.  Problems like this are usually the power
supply.  Could it be the mobo, yes it could but the power supply is more
likely, usually cheaper to replace and easier to.  I had a friends puter
that was acting weird, random reboots and such, it was the power
supply.   A bad power supply can cause all sorts of weird problems. 

If you can, unplug everything including the CD/DVD drive.  No hard
drives either.  Just play with the BIOS.  Basically, don't try to boot
anything, just look at the BIOS itself.  If it acts weird, start with
the power supply.  If you have to, go to a local place and pick up a
cheap power supply.  Put it in just long enough to see if that is the
problem.  If it works, then order you a real good power supply.  Just
keep the cheapy for testing purposes.  If the cheapy power supply
presents the same problem, then it could be the mobo. 

Random problems are hard to fix sometimes.  You just have to swap things
until you find the bad part.  I would put the odds at 80% that it is the
power supply tho.

While at it, do you know what brand and the wattage of your power
supply?  It could be that someone on here as experience with that
particular brand or even that exact model. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

-- 
I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!