Any ideas what this might be?
I was having a crash with instant power down. So I replaced the PSU with a Xilence, and for a while all seemed well. Then it happened again. Restarted. But to restart, I had to actually unplug the power cable. Only then did the power switch work.
All carried along fine for a week or so - I never turn it off, and ir ran just fine. Then just now, it happens again!
In the meantime afflicted by a sudden rush of nerves I have made a backup using clonezilla so its not going to be the end of the world if it goes south.
What happens is, try to use the power switch and nothing whatever happens. Then I connected up to a different power cable and a different socket, and it goes on. The Gigabyte board asks me to pick the last good boot, so I do. Then it powers down and restarts, and goes into the usual Debian login, after which it runs the disk diagnostic and repairs itself, and now its running just fine again.
What on earth could it be and what should I do?
See what is weird is that I am tempted to think maybe its the extension block, but the screen runs off that, and that is just fine. It seems reasonable to change out the extension block because they are not expensive. But I can't quite see how that could do it.
There is no doubt that last time it was the psu. It was totally dead, and replacing that first with the evo and then with the xilence, it did actually bring it all back to life. But this time its clearly not the psu, or could it be?
Al
As an educated guess I'd say either there has been a power spike/overload or PSU failure that puts it into protection mode or there is something going on with your mainboard.
When you say "The Gigabyte board asks me to pick the last good boot" what exactly is the message ? Is it falling back to a redundant BIOS image ?
Is the PSU adequately sized for the machine..I know we had this conversation late last year on the list. But specifically if you use a PSU calculator for your combination of hardware components does the current draw on the 12v rails come in at way under whatever it says for that rail on the PSU spec.
If you go by wattage alone you don't know if the distribution of capacity is sufficient across the rails for your hardware. You often can't for example draw the total rated capacity from one rail. Sometimes despite the overall rating appearing to be sufficient the 12V rail can be undersized, this is particularly true on PSU's designed for older hardware.
OK, happened again. This time it is connected to a different power outlet with no surge protection strip - I just got a new one, this one Belkin, and have moved to that. But the last outage happened last night before that one was installed.
It has run without being switched off for several days now. Yesterday I go out of the room, come back in and see the Gigabyte screen. Its not the boot screen, its the one immdediately before that which offers you various bios configurations. On a usb keyboard nothing has any effect here.
So I hit the reboot button and then it offers several alternative boots - this is the main board, not Debian or Grub.
I didn't pick any, and away it went, started normally and is still running fine. Unfortunately did not write them all down, but I think it showed several failed boots and invited one to choose the last good one.
I am now connected to the new surge strip which has all kinds of awesome sounding but incormprehensible parameters, and am guessing that if this happens again on the Belkin surge protection strip the sensible thing to try next would be replace the main board?
Does that seem right?
The two funny things about this were (1) that the computer was doing nothing at all when it happened (2) other machines in the house that are also running on the same ring main are not affected, so it surely can't be a surge in the mains supply. Which seems to leave the main board as the next thing to try.
Weird.
Al
It might be something as simple as the battery on the main board. They are usually easy to change.
Nev
On 19/01/13 08:42, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
OK, happened again. This time it is connected to a different power outlet with no surge protection strip - I just got a new one, this one Belkin, and have moved to that. But the last outage happened last night before that one was installed.
It has run without being switched off for several days now. Yesterday I go out of the room, come back in and see the Gigabyte screen. Its not the boot screen, its the one immdediately before that which offers you various bios configurations. On a usb keyboard nothing has any effect here.
So I hit the reboot button and then it offers several alternative boots - this is the main board, not Debian or Grub.
I didn't pick any, and away it went, started normally and is still running fine. Unfortunately did not write them all down, but I think it showed several failed boots and invited one to choose the last good one.
I am now connected to the new surge strip which has all kinds of awesome sounding but incormprehensible parameters, and am guessing that if this happens again on the Belkin surge protection strip the sensible thing to try next would be replace the main board?
Does that seem right?
The two funny things about this were (1) that the computer was doing nothing at all when it happened (2) other machines in the house that are also running on the same ring main are not affected, so it surely can't be a surge in the mains supply. Which seems to leave the main board as the next thing to try.
Thinking that its probably time to get another main board. Talked to the local shop, they have batteries but say they don't think the symptoms could be due to failing battery. I can try but its so intermittent. The latest thing that happened, it crashed three times on Saturday, once restarting itself quite normally. I have been checking temps using gkrellm thinking maybe the thermal paste had deteriorated - they are 33 and 32C on the two cores after about a half hour working this am.
One of the crashes on Saturday was with only the bios screen open. Simply died. I was looking at the temperature at the time: 49C cpu, 50 PCH (whatever that is!).
I am thinking of an Asus board and an i5 processor - the old one is socket 1156 so the whole lot has to be replaced.. Ouch!
The Gigabyte screen when it does the delayed boot shows Boot Record, and then it shows a little table, success 1 2 success2 4 success3 4
Don't know what this means. It also offers you a choice of last good and default.
Al
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nev young -
Peter Alcibiades -
Wayne Stallwood