[Novalug] Dead Computer Diagnosis

[gregory pryzby]

I didn't see anything about the disk. 

Does the disk spin up? If you are brave, you can 'lift' the disk and
if it has spun up, you will 'feel' the gyro going. 

If the disk is working, move it to another machine. 

My guess is disk is dead. If that is not it, the system just quit.
This has happened to me in the past as my machines run 24x7 for years
5+) until they just die.

On Thu, Nov 16, 2006 at 08:46:39AM -0500, David A. Hammond wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have a machine which is (nearly) dead and I need some help
> getting started on diagnosing it.  There's not much to go on.
> 
> When I hit the power switch, it lights up and both fans (power
> supply and cpu) spin.  Nothing else happens.  The keyboard
> lights don't flash, there's no beep, and no synch is sent to
> the monitor.  As best I can tell there are no diagnostic leds
> anywhere on the motherboard.
> 
> What led up to this state is as follows:
> 
> This machine is primarily used as a file server, name server,
> DHCP server, etc.  A couple of nights ago it wasn't serving
> anything and I could not ping it, so I turned the monitor on
> and found that I had no synch.  So I tried to reboot it.  It
> got pretty far into the boot sequence (Fedora Core 3) and
> hung.  So I tried again.  It didn't get as far so I tried
> yet again.  This time it quit even quicker, so I figured maybe
> it was a heat problem and unplugged it for about a half an
> hour.  When I powered it back up I went into setup so I could
> watch the cpu temperature.  It started at 36 C and slowly climbed to 45 C where it seemed to level off.  I then turned
> it off but did not unplug it.  When I came back the next
> evening, I found it in the state described at the top of this
> note.
> 
> One other thing:  When I was trying the reboots the first
> night, I could power the machine off with the front panel
> switch but I could not power it back up unless I unplugged
> it for about 10-15 seconds.  Does this give any hints?
> 
> I have a digital voltmeter, so I can check voltages out of
> the power supply.  I haven't done that yet.

-- 
greg pryzby                              greg at pryzby dot org
fingerprint: 8A1A DB90 869F 5DD1 D6E9 EEB6 C156 6B04 849F A86F
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