Re: Random Crashes
On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 11:42:08AM -0300, Eduardo M KALINOWSKI wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Ever since I bought my AMD64 system (AMD 64 3000+, Asus K8U-X
> motherboard) I've been experiencing random freezes, in which the system
> completely stops to respond, or sometimes automatic reboots. Sometimes
> the system halts during boot with a message such as
>
> HARDWARE ERROR
> CPU 0: Machine Check Exception: 4
> Bank 4: b200000000070f0f
> TSC a38a02f0b
> This is not a software problem!
>
>
> The crashes do not necessarily happen when the system is doing
> something ram or processor intensive. I can do heavy tasks such as video
> encoding with no problems, but sometimes the system crashes when it's
> idle, only background tasks running. Also, the crashes are not so frequent.
>
> When I bought the system, it had one stick with 512Mb of RAM.
> Crashes already happened then. Later I added anoter stick with 1Gb of
> RAM. I suspected the memory, and ran memtest only. But it was for a
> short time, so in fact I cannot conclude anything from the lack of errors.
>
> So I took of the "old" 512Mb ram module, because it should be the
> one with problems, since the crashes happened already when I had only
> that one. The system still crashed. Just to be sure, I put it on again,
> and only this one, and the system also crashes. The motherboard has two
> slots for RAM. I tried both modules in both slots, and I did notice that
> when a module (either one) is in one of the slots, the system crashes
> just after boot --- at most I can type the password and let KDE start,
> but it crashes before KDE is fully loaded. With a module in the other
> slot, then the system is usable most of the times.
>
> So, am I really unlucky to have two memory modules with problems, or
> what else should I suspect? Motherboard? Processor? What would be the
> possible ways to diagnose the problem?
A google search on that error message seems to indicate that it has been
seen on some systems where the power supply wasn't sufficient to provide
stable power to the system. Other posibilities is that the ram simply
isn't stable (although bad power can make ram not stable of course).
What size power supply, what brand/model, and how much hardware is in
that system?
--
Len Sorensen
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