[PLUG] Hardware driving me nuts!

[John Jason Jordan]

On Thu, 3 May 2007 14:41:00 -0700
"Larry Brigman" <larry.brigman at gmail.com> dijo:

> > Does anyone know if there is a list somewhere of hardware faults that
> > can cause a sudden power off? If this was your box, what would you
> > suspect next?
> 
> Over current on any output line of the power supply.  Possibly the CPU now doing
> too much and sucking the power supply off line?
> 
> To prove it would be the CPU and not the HDs find something that is
> CPU intensive
> and run it.  If you can get close  to 100% on both CPUs then I would think that
> you have a HD error causing the problem.  HD formatting doesn't work a
> HD very hard.

First, to Alan, yes I have run memtest86+, although only for an hour.
However, there are two memory slots and each has a 1 GB Corsair stick
in it. I removed the stick that was in slot 1 and moved the stick from
slot 2 into it. There was no change in the problem. Assuming that slot
1 is the first one to be used, and none of the things I have been doing
have used very much RAM, I am guessing that this eliminates RAM as an
issue.

For my most recent attempt I reset the BIOS using the jumper on the
motherboard, then entered the BIOS and set it to "Optimized defaults."
This is what Abit recommends for new installations or any time there
are problems. When I rebooted I was surprised to see Feisty start to
load even though there was a GRML Rescue CD in the drive. Then I
realized that "Optimized defaults" must have set the initial boot drive
to the hard disk. Lame, but oh well. 

The interesting thing is that Feisty actually booted all the way up. I
haven't seen Feisty running on this box for about four days now. I just
stared at it for a while and then left it running while I worked at the
laptop. I never touched the mouse or keyboard. After about 15 minutes
the screen went black and computer shut down. All by itself. 

So then I restarted it, went into the BIOS, and changed the boot order
so it would boot from the CD. I had the GRML Rescue CD in the drive, so
when I exited the BIOS that is what came up. But it won't even finish
booting without getting shut down. I tried it several times, but I
can't get the GRML Rescue CD to finish booting.  I think things are
getting worse.

I guess next I need to check the CPU. The Ultimate Boot CD has CPU
tests, but only for Intel CPUs. This is AM-2 64-bit. I'll google and
see if I can turn something up.