Re: fried(?) computer hangs on boot
Pigeon wrote:
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.
Prolly. But I noticed that merely deleting symlinks (not the smartest
thing in the world, but I figured it couldn't hurt at this point) didn't
make a significant amount of difference; I'm not sure that doing that
made much difference in the boot time, though, either. So that's why
I'm not *entirely* sure that the hanging is time-dependent, but I've a
hunch it is.
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.
Hmm. I think it's pertinent that this incarnation of my computer is the
*second* one-- the first one I had custom-made ~1 year ago, and the
idiot obviously didn't know how to put an AMD system together because he
stuck a Duron in there with a P4 powersupply (barely enough power and
not enough exhaust for an AMD system) and NO CASEFANS. So, the thing
had a tendency to overheat to begin with, and actually shut itself off
several times because it was too hot. I ended up running it with the
side panel pulled off and the fan in my room on 24/7. Then I rebuilt it
last Christmas from a kit my parents bought me-- all I really needed to
add was the processor, the RAM, and the drives and I was good to go-- so
I just pulled all that stuff out of the original box I had. So,
basically, I was asking for trouble from the beginning, using the
processor that had already overheated several times?
Things to try include:
- Boot off a floppy, see if it continues to work or if it still
crashes after a bit
Tried booting from tomsrtbt, and it runs like a charm.
- Stick the HD in another computer and see if it boots there OK
The computer I have is a Duron and the kernel is optimised for it; will
it boot on a P4 system? The only other computer in the house is my
parents' P4. Or should I boot from the Debian rescue disk?
- 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'll try that soon, as soon as I can figure out how without getting the
inside of the computer wet (I can't afford dry ice).
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.
Nope, the linux box is my gateway/firewall/server/desktop/workstation.
It does a lot of stuff; in fact, I just signed up at dyndns.org so I
could run my webserver and ssh server without having to memorize my IP
address all the time-- the night I signed up was the night it crashed. :(
---
[This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus]
Reply to: