Peter Humphrey wrote:
On Tuesday 29 May 2007 07:59:42 Michael Ulm wrote:
Hi,
I seem to get system crashes on my machine when it is idle for
some time. Here is a typical crashing session:
[...]
Maybe it's the hardware, but what kind of hardware issue could cause
these symptoms?
Any ideas anyone?
A couple. Either RAM or hard disk would be my first suspect. You can check
the RAM best by compiling any large package, such as gcc itself. Memtest
and its like can only find the most obvious faults and in my opinion aren't
worth their salt - if they can find a fault, it will already be obvious to
you.
Secondly, with the advent of SATA I'm suspecting a new class of fault in
hard disks. Not only do we have the traditional transfer errors, but now I
suspect it's possible for some faults to allow voltage spikes to be imposed
on the line driver and cause random errors in other subsystems. I may be
wrong, but I've had one experience of this already, and I'm currently
working to eliminate another disk as the cause of weird problems I'm
having.
Oh, and there's always the power supply. If that goes wonky it can cause all
manner of problems. You could well suspect it if problems don't occur until
after the system's been running for quite a while.
Thank you for your suggestions. I have had no problems so far compiling my
Gentoo packages, and I often stressed my system with lengthy computations
without any issues. So I tend to think the RAM is good.
I thought that power supply issues would tend to occur under stress, not under
rest. But you are right of course, the problems may occur after some delay.
Unfortunately I've no idea how to test this.
I'll check the disk to see if something comes up there. I also plan to install
Ubuntu on some separate disk and see if the problem occurs there as well.
If these are indeed hardware related problems, I feel like abusing this group
(which is software related after all) with my problems. So, I'd also appreciate
suggestions which online community would be better suited for help with
debugging hardware issues.
Thanks,
Michael
--
Michael Ulm
R&D Team
ISIS Information Systems Austria
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