Kent West wrote:
Bob Proulx wrote:Not a bad guess. But if that's the case, it must be firm-coded into the BIOS; I could find no power-saving options in the BIOS setup screens. I had not thought about memtest86 perhaps looking idle to the system whereas sitting at a Knoppix boot prompt would not. Your idea gives me an idea for another test; tomorrow I'll see if I can load memtest86 but pause it so it doesn't check memory, and see if it still powers off at 35 mins; if so, that would seem to eliminate faulty RAM as being the cause of the power-down.Kent West wrote:Running memtest86 from a Knoppix LiveCD on an HP pavilion ze4400 laptop. No errors, but the laptop powers off consistently after about 35 minutes of testing.If that is consistently 35 minutes then it makes me wonder how the BIOS power saving settings are configured. I would guess that the BIOS is not seeing any input and therefore turning the machine off because it thinks it is idle. I believe that after the OS is booted it takes over these things. But memtest may not be programmed to do this for that machine while the linux kernel in knoppix does. Just a guess...Thanks!
Nope; the BIOS is not shutting down the laptop.I paused the memtest for five minutes, and then let it continue; the shutdown occurred five minutes later than it had been shutting down.
So I restarted the memtest, but this time changed the settings to start with test #7; now it shuts down within about one minute. (I tested this a couple of times; I also started with #6 once and it ran for a few minutes, then I changed it to test #7, and it ran for a minute or so and then shut down.)
So the memtest is somehow triggering the shutdown of the laptop.Is this indicative of bad RAM, even though I've seen no other indication of bad RAM, or is it just a coincidence that some pattern during the random number test is triggering a power-off?
Hmmm.... -- Kent