On Mon, May 26, 2003 at 12:29:35PM -0400, Vikki Roemer wrote: > Hi! > My computer (running Sarge) overheated and hung the night before last. > I didn't realize why it had hung until it had been overheating for a > few hours (I went to bed, waiting for it to unhang, hence the delay), > then when I woke up I figured out why it was probably hanging and turned > it off. While it was off, I cleaned an incredible amount of dust and > cruft out of the CPU heatsink, so that explains the overheating. > > Anyway, after it had cooled off thoroughly, I tried turning it back on, > and there doesn't seem to be any damage to the MB or the processor > because it'll boot, but once it gets to (and actually most of the way > through) booting runlevel 3, it just hangs. It doesn't matter what > program it's starting (I've played around with the symlinks), it just > gets to a certain point and hangs. Maybe it's a timing thing? I wouldn't be surprised if time was involved: that if you deliberately put some delay in early on in the boot process, it wouldn't get so far before it hung. > I'm pretty stumped by this whole thing. Is it a problem with the > processor? Or is the disk corrupted? I'm using ext3, which I know is > *less likely* to corrupt, but heat will still corrupt a journalled fs. > Do I have to just reinstall from scratch? Since your processor heatsink was full of gunk, a damaged processor would be my first thought. I would surmise that maybe the overheating has caused leakage currents to increase or something along those lines, so that while it still works, it consumes more power than it should be doing and rapidly overheats. Things to try include: - Boot off a floppy, see if it continues to work or if it still crashes after a bit - Stick the HD in another computer and see if it boots there OK - Increase the processor cooling somehow: place plastic bags of melting ice in contact with the heatsink if you can do so without obstructing the airflow; suspend a chunk of dry ice in the intake side of the CPU fan; give the heatsink a squirt of freezer spray every so often; use a vacuum cleaner in blow mode to give it hurricane force airflow. See if it runs for longer before it crashes. > I'm trying to get my computer up as fast as I can because it's the > firewall/gateway for my family's LAN. At the moment I'm stuck with my > parents' Win2k computer, I moved the modem to this computer, but I want > to get it back behind a firewall ASAP. If that's all it's doing you can probably get a cruddy old computer that would still be big enough to do the job for less than the cost of a new CPU, which would get you going while you troubleshoot the dead machine with less haste. Alternatively, if the dead machine is already a cruddy old computer because its duties don't call for anything more capable, a replacement CPU should be dirt cheap. -- Pigeon Be kind to pigeons Get my GPG key here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F
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