On Sun, 2002-01-13 at 14:25, Phil Deane wrote: > > > Hi Folks > > Let me tell you what happened before I start asking questions. > > On Wednesday night about 630pm I had the computer booted using linux, i told > it to update which it was doing through the night, in the morning i booted > it into windows xp where it stayed until i got home at about 6:30pm on > thursday where my mandrake 8.2 discs where waiting on me. I updated my > distro , got my [rinter working (woo hoo) and staretd it updating again. At > about 2:30am Friday i told linux to reboot into windows, and it got stuck > shutting down the usb devices. > > It hung not doing anything, so i hit the reset switch, wouldn't reset. So i > flicked the power off, and there started my problem, the fecking thing would > not come back on again. I have now built another machine from spare parts, > maybe not the fastest in the world, but functional. My old machine would not > power back up again. Although my original Hard disks still work, but my > floppy seems to on the blink, but that could be because i bent one of the > pins when i wa transferring it > > To cut a long story short i just got it working again, by reseting the bios, > 2 days after it happened. > > Could this have been caued by linux or could it have been caused by > coincedence, since it was up for nearly 30 hours? ( People may remember my > post abou thge noisy fan, so it may have overheated) > > Can anyone offer any solutions, unfortunatly to get it working again i have > had to reformat my linux partition, so i have no logs of what happened. > > Could it maybe have happened because i updated the distro from 7.2 to 8.1 > instead of doing a fresh install? and it somehow affected the usb drivers? > > Could it happen again??
Its unlikly anything like upgrading could kill your bios. It is quite possible if your computer was running hot that it overheated and the bios attempted to kick in and shut off the machine and failed or something like that. If my cpu gets to 80degrees, my pc resets itself, (Actually its supposed to shut off, but for some reason my machine is incapable of being powered down, if i want to turn it off i actually need to pull the plug out the back even from a normal shutdown - Started doing it a while back, no idea why :) Its also possible if it tried to update a library that was being used (glibc comes to mind) that something important was linked to the older version and borked because something changed. > > Is linux that powerful that it can rewrite the bios settings? Linux can write to the bios, remember those programs you get to upgrade your bios in dos. Linux is just as capable with the right software. And if you enable it in the bios you can get a device in /dev which you can use to manipulate your computers nvram. > > Anyone have any solutions? theories? Not really, i would put it down to cooincidence, possible if your computer was doing a lot of decompression/disc io etc it could have overheated. The bios could have overheated or something as a result. Then again it could have just been one of those things. > I wanted to send this email before i rebuilt my normal computer, (this one i > am using is a p200 with 64mb ram, hellish slow using winxp) and my normal > one is a p3 800 with 312mb ram, > > Please excuse the spelling as I am using web based mail for this till i get > email set up properly again, and also i am using a lower res than i normally > use so it may look distorted. > > Thanks in Advance > Phil > > > -------------------------------------------------------------------- > http://www.lug.org.uk http://www.linuxportal.co.uk > http://www.linuxjob.co.uk http://www.linuxshop.co.uk > -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.lug.org.uk http://www.linuxportal.co.uk http://www.linuxjob.co.uk http://www.linuxshop.co.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------
