Date: 06 Jul 2003 13:14:12 -0400 From: Adam <blueeskimo@gmx.net> To: FreeBSD-Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: More hardware problems (advice needed) Message-ID: <1057511651.581.27.camel@elwood>
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My main FreeBSD (4.8) box has died on me again, and I'm 99% certain it's due to hardware failure. However, I'm having a very hard time determining what hardware is going bad, due to the nature of the crash. Let me describe the scenario. I was working on the machine, not doing anything out of the ordinary. All of a sudden, my mouse stopped responding. I thought maybe moused had crashed, so I did 'ps -aux |fgrep moused'. This caused ps to segfault, which caused me to nearly soil myself. So, I decided to quickly kill all my apps and exit X so I could reboot. When I closed X, I noticed a lot of errors on my console about dc0 (my Linksys NIC interface, external) having underruns, and that ad2 was timed out. I also noticed that my LAN connection to my other box was dead. I tried to reboot, and all went well until it got to the 'Rebooting...', at which point it hung. I waited for 10+ minutes, thinking it might eventually reboot, but it was stuck, so I turned it off. When I powered back up, I got tons of errors that the kernel couldn't be loaded, and I couldn't even get into single-user mode. So, I made a fixit floppy and fired up the fixit shell, and start poking around to see what happened. I was able to mount ad3 and ad2 just fine, but mounting ad0 caused fixit to panic and the machine reboot. So, this is where I am now. For those of you that remember, I had another crash & burn experience on that machine a couple months ago, where the machine just suddenly froze completely and my ad0 was trashed when I boot back up. That time, I didn't have backups. This time, I do. But, before I work on that computer again, I think I need to replace some hardware. I've heard pretty good arguments for both the ad0 drive (Western Digital 120gb, 2mb cache), and for the motherboard/cpu (Asus A7V266-E, Athlon 1600+). I used memtest86 to test the RAM, which came up clean. I doubt if its a power problem, since I've got a very nice case (Antec 1080, 400+ watts). Also, I've got another machine in my apartment that hasn't experienced any weird problems like this. The CPU might be overheating, but its hard to tell. Roughly 5 minutes after the crash, I checked the CPU temperature from the BIOS, which registered 63C for the CPU. I have no idea how hot the CPU was at the time of the crash, but it definitely had to have cooled off a bit in those 5 minutes. I don't have enough $$ to replace all the hardware, so I'd like some expert advice as to what is the most likely culprit. I don't know if I'll be able to convince any of Asus, AMD, or Western Digital to give me an RMA number, but I can try (also would like some advice on this to maximize my chances). Thanks, Adam
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