[Novalug] Dead Computer Diagnosis

James Ewing Cottrell 3rd JECottrell3@Comcast.NET
Sat Nov 18 04:43:25 EST 2006


gregory pryzby wrote:

>I didn't see anything about the disk. 
>  
>
Me neither. An important clue.

>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. 
>  
>
Good call. You generally hear a click as well.

>If the disk is working, move it to another machine. 
>  
>
Yeah. The disk is the real identity of the machine. The rest is just 
hardware support.

>My guess is disk is dead.
>
I would say that this is exactly backwards, given his clues. No flashes 
on the keyboard or video. Even a machine with no disks will enter the BIOS.

>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.
>  
>
Yup. Just like that. One minute alive. The next, dead.

If it's not the power supply, you probably need to replace the 
motherboard and/or CPU. I don't have enough experience to know whether 
it's worth trying to replace just one, and in what order, but I am 
afraid that a bad motherboard might fry a good CPU and/or vice versa.

If you get enough bad parts you can experiment on those, but I'd just 
replace both.

JIM

>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.
>>    
>>
>
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