linuxaudio.org

Dave Phillips wrote:
> Greetings:

quoted text
>

>  It has not been a good week.

>

>  As I mentioned yesterday I swapped my hardware into an identical box

> as my original machine. Yesterday everything seemed to have returned

> to normal operation. I watched some movies, worked on some music, and

> so forth.

>

>  Today I powered up the box, logged on to the net, downloaded the

> latest Csound CVS and started compiling. After a few minutes

> everything froze again, the machine was locked tight as a drum. I had

> to pull the plug to restart, but when grub came up my keyboard was

> frozen. I pulled the plug again and got my keyboard back after

> restarting.

>

>  Now I'm running memtest again. I realized yesterday that I'd run it

> on only one RAM stick so I thought I'd better check again. However, at

> this point I'm starting to suspect a bad drive. But *two* bad drives

> in the system ?? As I mentioned in an earlier message, the machine

> failure occurred regardless of which drive I was using (RH9 on

> /dev/hdb, FC3 on /dev/hda).

>

>  So I'm bummed again. Looks like it's time to bite the bullet and buy

> a whole new system. :(

>

Hey Dave,

Obviously, each component that you transfered from the old to the new

system is suspect. Drives usually fail miserably, not after a while...

though, it's not impossible to suffer a long death. But, when they do,

it's usually noticeable upon reboot... but, again, not always (not an

exact science!). It's possible that you have a bad area on one of the

drives that is used for the swap space and when a critical area is

swapped it bombs.
 From the thermal pov: Did you bring over IDE or SCSI cards for your

drive? If so, you might swap those out. But, it's stretching.
It sure sounds like a memory problem. (note that not all memtests test

memory effectively).  Sometimes a memory problem is so small that it

doesn't necessarily effect the operation of the computer until later at

a random time. If I were you I'd swap out all memory and let it run.

If you can't swap out the memory, you could try booting up into DOS or

BIOS and just let it sit there for a good long while. Just something

that wouldn't exercise RAM to eliminate thermal or other parts that

you've transfered from the old computer.
brad
--

Brad Fuller

(408) 799-6124

** Sonaural Audio Studios **

(408) 799-6123  West San Jose

(408) 799-6124  Cambrian

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