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Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2013 08:04:26 -0700 (MST)
From: Warren Block <wblock@wonkity.com>
To: Ronald Klop <ronald-freebsd8@klop.yi.org>
Subject: Re: Spontaneous reboots on Intel i5 and FreeBSD 9.0
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On Fri, 18 Jan 2013, Ronald Klop wrote:

> Memory chips gone bad? Power (or other) cables gone loose?

Memory failures will cause intermittent and mysterious things.  Easy to 
test, too, just run memtest86 on it for a while.  Do that before 
rebuilding.  If memory is failing, corrupted data could be written to 
disk.

I had a Crucial DIMM fail spontaneously a couple of weeks ago.  Working 
one minute, totally failed the next.  The machine rebooted, for no 
visible reason.  After it came back up, compiles failed, always with 
different errors and in different places.

Power supplies also fail, as do motherboards.  These are both harder to 
swap out than memory, so test the memory first.