Random Restarts?

[Garrett Cooper]

Edward Ruggeri wrote:
> On Sun, 20 May 2007 13:23:00 -0500, Garrett Cooper 
> <youshi10 at u.washington.edu> wrote:
> 
>> Roland Smith wrote:
>>> On Sun, May 20, 2007 at 11:03:25AM -0500, Edward Ruggeri wrote:
>>>>  Hi,
>>>>
>>>>  My system randomly reboots, usually in the evening.  It is 
>>>> definitely not a  soft reboot, since the filesystems don't get 
>>>> properly dismounted.  My  suspicion is that it is a heat related 
>>>> issue -- I do leave the computer  running just about all day long, 
>>>> and it has started to get warm.  Then  again, it's coolest in the 
>>>> evening...
>>>  Try and install the mbmon port, and see if it works on your machine. If
>>> so, start a cron job that appends mbmon output to a file say every 15
>>> minutes. If it's a heat buildup issue in a monitored component, it 
>>> would show.
>>>  I wonder though. My machine usually doesn't need a day to heat up after
>>> a cold start. An hour or so usually suffices.
>>>  Other causes could be a spike in the line voltage due to a large device
>>> switching on or off nearby. Or an underrated power supply overloaded
>>> through a cron job.
>>>   Roland
>>
>> Also, check to see if your memory doesn't have any errors. That can 
>> cause reboots from time to time if either the memory controller is 
>> bad, or the memory itself is bad.
>>
>> Also, this heat issue could be true for your hard drives. I've seen 
>> some of my faster drives get up to 140 degrees F (before I bought fans 
>> for them), then force the workstation to hard reboot. This was when I 
>> was doing a lot of disk access with them, too, since normal idling 
>> didn't head up the drives enough.
>>
>> Just curious:
>> a. What's your Processor (speed, vendor)?
>> b. Who made your motherboard?
>> c. Who made your RAM?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> -Garrett
> 
> Thanks everyone!
> 
> Athlon X2 4200+ proc (2.2GHz, maybe?)
> DFI nF4 infinity SLI motheboard
> G.Skill RAM (2GB)
> Antec True Power II (550W)
> 
> I'll use MemTest or somesuch to test my RAM latter today for errors.
> 
> The drives sit right infront of the air-intake fans for the system, so 
> there's a breeze that flows by them constantly.  However, additional 
> cooling certainly might be necessary.  Perhaps, it is possible that 
> rTorrent is doing a lot of reads and writes to the drive, stressing it, 
> which may be why the problem seems to have come up around the time I 
> started using rTorrent.
> 
> I think my plan will be so:
> 1.) Continue running mbmon until I get a restart, and then check to see 
> if there was a voltage drop (or, less likely, a heat spike).
> 2.) Then, run MemTest86+ for a day or so, checking for RAM problems.
> 
> I don't have a probe to measure the hard drive temps, but if 1&2 fail, 
> I'll arrange better cooling for the drives, I guess.  If it's a driver 
> issue, is there any way to find it?  I haven't installed any new 
> hardware recently, and hadn't had this problem until maybe a week ago.
> 
> Sorry to clog up the freeBSD listhost with (likely) a hardware issue.  I 
> can move to another listhost if you guys think I should.

I'm not a big AMD user, but I would guess given the list of features on 
the motherboard's site that you have some sort of hardware supported CPU 
frequency control. I would hunt around your BIOS, see if you can enable 
that functionality, and see if that solves the problem.

I will say that your MB and memory vendors sound like small 3rd party 
groups, and I've faced a lot of issues with those types of vendors; 
that's why I stick with select ASUS MBs, and Corsair or similar memory 
vendors.

-Garrett