[PLUG] Hardware driving me nuts!

[drew wymore]

On 5/3/07, John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> 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.



Might be CPU overheating. causing the machine to shutdown in order to
prevent it from blowing up (not literally of course)