On 07/28/2012 02:57 PM, Bruce Miller wrote:
Please forgive the elementary nature of these questions. A recently-widowed
friend has asked me to help troubleshoot her late husband's large and powerful
Windows 7 system. I am myself somewhat preoccupied with other matters and am
sure that I am missing one (or more) obvious solution(s).
The major constraint is that her late husband was a professional photographer
and he has image files everywhere on his system. Even I can recognize that he
was a truly gifted photographer, but that his computer skills were not to match.
There is exactly one USB backup drive and so far I have no idea whether the
backup is complete (I doubt it) or restorable. I am being careful therefore to
limit anything I do to non-destructive testing that does not touch the hard
disks until I have time to do an exhaustive search for all his image files and
ensure that there are *_multiple_* backups of each. Moreover, I have just
learned that he had performed a very expert calibration of his system to a
professional colour printer. I have no idea what or where those calibration
files are.
Since I almost always use Kubuntu, my primary resource (at the outset) is a CD
of Kubuntu amd64 12.04 LTS.
The obvious symptom on the Windows 7 machine is a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death)
almost every 20 minutes. This is so frequent as to make the machine unusable.
The first exception code on the BSOD is a memory location of<multiple zeros>1.
Her tech support person (owner of a well-known local computer store and fellow
photographic expert) says that the single digit in the exception code suggests a
hardware failure, probably on the motherboard.
I have been running Kubuntu from the liveCD for over eighteen hours which does
not support the defective motherboard hypothesis. But my mind has gone blank on
how to stress-test the hardware without writing to any hard disks. Google has
not been a friend; on this problem, I have found it surprisingly unhelpful.
So far, I have been running just a browser, a konsole session and glxgears. The
latter will put some load on the CPU and more on the graphics subsystem. Google
did lead me to a sourceforge utility called systester which at least tests the
CPU by attempting to calculate pi to many millions of significant digits. But I
cannot get it to run.
So my questions are the following:
1. Does anyone have suggestions on safe non-destructive hardware stress-testing
applications? I have no objection to downloading and burning to CD a
specialized distro.
2. Is anyone familiar with systester? ( http://systester.sourceforge.net/about.php ). The
sourceforge site provides precompiled generic binaries for both i686 and amd64, both CLI and
qt-based GUI versions. I have tried copying the binaries to /usr/local/bin/, chowning the binaries
to root: and running as root. But, running off the Kubuntu LiveCD, I get consistent
"permission denied" errors. BTW, the LiveCD drops straight to a root prompt when one
enters "sudo -s" into a terminal session. There is no password.
The system is an Intel i7 with 8GB of RAM. It is a 2008-vintage Asus P6T
motherboard; the catch is that it takes an LGA1366 CPU, which is no longer
available. Replacing both the motherboard and CPU will cost north of $500 and
my reluctance to recommend that my friend spend that sort of money is
heightened by the last 18 hours of evidence that the problem is not with the MB.
The following is the output of lspci. I have tried running hwinfo, but it
produces hundreds of lines of output. I will post only if someone finds it
potentially useful.
root@kubuntu:/usr/local/bin# lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub to ESI Port (rev
12)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub PCI Express Root
Port 1 (rev 12)
00:03.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub PCI Express Root
Port 3 (rev 12)
00:07.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub PCI Express Root
Port 7 (rev 12)
00:10.0 PIC: Intel Corporation 5520/5500/X58 Physical and Link Layer Registers
Port 0 (rev 12)
00:10.1 PIC: Intel Corporation 5520/5500/X58 Routing and Protocol Layer
Registers Port 0 (rev 12)
00:13.0 PIC: Intel Corporation 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub I/OxAPIC Interrupt
Controller (rev 12)
00:14.0 PIC: Intel Corporation 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub System Management
Registers (rev 12)
00:14.1 PIC: Intel Corporation 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub GPIO and Scratch Pad
Registers (rev 12)
00:14.2 PIC: Intel Corporation 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub Control Status and RAS
Registers (rev 12)
00:14.3 PIC: Intel Corporation 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub Throttle Registers (rev 12)
00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI
Controller #4
00:1a.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI
Controller #5
00:1a.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI
Controller #6
00:1a.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB2 EHCI
Controller #2
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) HD Audio
Controller
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) PCI Express Root
Port 1
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) PCI Express Root
Port 3
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) PCI Express Root
Port 4
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) PCI Express Root
Port 5
00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI
Controller #1
00:1d.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI
Controller #2
00:1d.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI
Controller #3
00:1d.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB2 EHCI
Controller #1
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 90)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801JIR (ICH10R) LPC Interface Controller
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) 4 port SATA IDE
Controller #1
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) SMBus Controller
00:1f.5 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) 2 port SATA IDE
Controller #2
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV770
[Radeon HD 4850]
02:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV770 HDMI Audio
[Radeon HD 4850/4870]
03:00.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7231 (rev aa)
04:00.0 SATA controller: JMicron Technology Corp. JMB363 SATA/IDE Controller
(rev 03)
04:00.1 IDE interface: JMicron Technology Corp. JMB363 SATA/IDE Controller (rev
03)
05:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6315 Series Firewire
Controller
06:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI
Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 02)
08:01.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6306/7/8 [Fire II(M)]
IEEE 1394 OHCI Controller (rev 46)
ff:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 QuickPath Architecture
Generic Non-Core Registers (rev 04)
ff:00.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 QuickPath Architecture
System Address Decoder (rev 04)
ff:02.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 QPI Link 0 (rev 04)
ff:02.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 QPI Physical 0 (rev 04)
ff:03.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory
Controller (rev 04)
ff:03.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory
Controller Target Address Decoder (rev 04)
ff:03.4 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory
Controller Test Registers (rev 04)
ff:04.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory
Controller Channel 0 Control Registers (rev 04)
ff:04.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory
Controller Channel 0 Address Registers (rev 04)
ff:04.2 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory
Controller Channel 0 Rank Registers (rev 04)
ff:04.3 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory
Controller Channel 0 Thermal Control Registers (rev 04)
ff:05.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory
Controller Channel 1 Control Registers (rev 04)
ff:05.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory
Controller Channel 1 Address Registers (rev 04)
ff:05.2 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory
Controller Channel 1 Rank Registers (rev 04)
ff:05.3 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory
Controller Channel 1 Thermal Control Registers (rev 04)
ff:06.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory
Controller Channel 2 Control Registers (rev 04)
ff:06.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory
Controller Channel 2 Address Registers (rev 04)
ff:06.2 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory
Controller Channel 2 Rank Registers (rev 04)
ff:06.3 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory
Controller Channel 2 Thermal Control Registers (rev 04)
root@kubuntu:/usr/local/bin#
--
Bruce Miller
br...@brmiller.ca
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: (613) 745-1151
Instead of spending $500, and not even knowing if that would solve the
problem, why not spend less than $100 and buy a portable hard drive.
Then, having booted up some Linux system from CD, copy all the picture
files off the system to the portable hard drive. Or even copy the whole
hard drive for cleanup later, if you're short of time.
--doug
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