Spontaneous Reboot

[Fred Nastos]

On March 3, 2004 11:58 am, William O'Higgins wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 03, 2004 at 08:33:12AM -0700, Taavi Burns wrote:
> >On Wed, Mar 03, 2004 at 09:25:42AM -0500, William O'Higgins wrote:
> >> Thanks for the quick reply, but that's not it.  The machine was for
> >> approximately 10 minutes at the time of the failure.  The CPU is a Duron
> >> 600.  Is there anywhere that the kernel would log a message along the
> >> lines of "What th-" besides /var/log/messages?
> >
> >If the CPU fan has stopped spinning, it might even be called surprising
> > that it managed to last 10 minutes.  It is "only" a Duron 600, though, so
> > 10 minutes might be just about right.
> >
> >I've heard reports of Athlons dying in under 10 seconds when the heatsink
> >has fallen off.
>
> I'll get into the case and make sure that everything is secure, but I am
> writing from the same machine right now, and it has been up for the last
> five hours without further incident.
>
> If a program crashed and took my machine with it, where would I look for
> the dumped core, or any messages pertaining to the issue?  Thanks.

It's almost definitely hardware.  Run memtest86 (http://www.memtest86.com/)
to test your RAM.  I had a computer running Fedora Core 1 that started 
spontaneously rebooting.  The RAM was littered with errors.

I can understand bad software "crashing" your computer.  Maybe causing a
hard lock if there is a problem with a video driver for example, but it seems 
unlikely that a software problem would be behind spontaneous reboots.

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml