[Novalug] Dead Computer Diagnosis

[rarob at comcast.net]

Might want to check the motherboard battery as well.  I've seen some *very* strange behavior
if this beastie is not in good shape.



-------------- Original message -------------- 
From: Peter Larsen <plarsen at famlarsen.homelinux.com> 

> 
> gregory pryzby wrote: 
> > 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. 
> 
> Since there's no POST beep it sounds like the BIOS doesn't get loaded. 
> So test/replace the PSU first. If the PSU work, it may be the mobo or 
> CPU. Usually mobo failures are results of overload, and you'll see "burn 
> marks" on it. CPU failures happens too, but you should get bios beeps 
> for that. If it was the disk you would be told that either it couldn't 
> find the disk, or that there were errors on it. 
> 
> HOWEVER - a quick fix can be simply to move the disks to a new but 
> similar computer and continue from there. 
> 
> If someone moved the box it could be as simple as a wire that "popped" 
> out from the mobo. It's happend to me ONCE back in the Pentium I days. 
> 
> I've lost a lot of PSUs in the last few years. I don't know if the 
> quality is just getting low or what's going on. I invested in a $15 PSU 
> tester, and it's been very handy. 
> 
> Regards 
> Peter Larsen 
> > 
> > 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. 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________ 
> > Novalug mailing list 
> > Novalug at calypso.tux.org 
> > http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/novalug 
> 
> _______________________________________________ 
> Novalug mailing list 
> Novalug at calypso.tux.org 
> http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/novalug 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://calypso.tux.org/pipermail/novalug/attachments/20061116/89dc7b87/attachment-0001.htm