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
