FreeBSD 6.1-STABLE: Unexplained power off

Garance A Drosihn drosih at rpi.edu
Tue Aug 15 19:32:59 UTC 2006


At 7:59 PM +0300 8/15/06, Android Andrew [:] wrote:
>Yes, nothing changed.
>
>Problem could be in anything: memory, raid controller,
>network adapter, power supply, bios and so on. But to
>test it all empirically will take too much time. The
>most annoying thing in this situation is absence of
>any system/kernel messages or reports that could
>explain something.
>
>Is there any methodology of troubleshooting in similar
>situations?

It can be very tedious to pin something like this down.
I had something like this hit with one system of mine,
which would die on 6.x-current (I think it was), but
still work fine on 5.x-stable (I think it was.  A dual-
boot system, but I forget exactly which releases).

After trying to pin it down to an update to 6.x, I
eventually got all the way back to the exact same
snapshot I had been running before the trouble started,
but the trouble still existed.  I even did a clean-
install of the 6.x system, from some original CD's that
were *before* the problem started, and yet I still had
problems.

And then I started to occasionally see the same problem
     on the 5.x system.
And then more frequently.
And finally it got to the point that the machine
      would not boot up at all.  Not even 'POST'.
      It was a dead parrot.

It ended up that something had gone wrong with the
motherboard itself.  It was about two months from the
time I first started to see problems to the point
where it completely died.  It was a very frustrating
two months!

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu


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