This is a rather old Celeron machine, 433 MHz with 320 MB ram. It was working properly up to a couple of days ago, when the first hd started dying out (which is understandable, given its age and the conditions it's in).
But then at some point the computer stopped booting completely --- bios starts (and runs properly, so to speak), then the os (it's windows, I know, I know) starts booting and does not pass the bootloader phase. Actually, I do not know exactely where it stops, but all I get is a black screen, even with no option for a safe mode or anything.
At first I just thought the problem was with the hd dying, but then the system failed to boot the fresh-and-tested Fedora 9 dvd. It spins up, the menu for installation appears (the text one, saying "type enter to install, type linux text to install in text mode" etc), and from that point the machine is locked up --- the function keys (which should provide extra info and help) do not work, the NumLock button does not toogle the appropriate led, nothing. It is frozen stiff, and all I can do is to reset it (ctrl-alt-del also does not work). Though, the dvd drive button does eject if pressed.
After a minute or two standing, it resets itself automatically, and starts over.
This situation is repeatable with Fedora 8 dvd and Windows XP installation (tommorow I'll try Knoppix Live cd). The media is not the problem, it works on other hardware.
I started the "long version" of memory check in bios, and it reports no problems. However, I could not get to the point to load memtest86, since it locks before I am given a choice to run it.
The processor seems alive, since bios works as expected. I also tried fiddling with the bios settings, loaded failsafe settings, tried various things like downclocking the processor and such, but to no avail.
What could fail and induce such behavior? I have never seen anything similar before. A computer usually does boot completely or does not boot at all. I've never seen it boot halfway and then lock up.
Oh, btw, the machine was exposed to some heat and humidity for the last couple of days --- nothing too extreme, it was just hot these days (around 40 degrees Celsius during the mid-day) and I keep the thing in the garage...
Any ideas?
:-) Marko
What could fail and induce such behavior? I have never seen anything similar before. A computer usually does boot completely or does not boot at all. I've never seen it boot halfway and then lock up.
Age, component failure , corrosion, static damage finally killing a device, fan failure ...
If its bust take it apart, completely. Earth yourself and then clean all the ram contacts, PCI and ISA card slots, tap all the chips firmly on the top and make sure they feel ok, check then fans seem ok.
Put it back together with the smallest amount of valid RAM configuration and no hard disks or PCI cards beyond the minimum and see if that passes memtest86. If it doesn't you can try reseating the CPU and the like but its probably game over.
If it boots like that add bits back until either its all back or it stops booting 8)
Alan
Marko Vojinovic vvmarko@panet.co.yu writes:
What could fail and induce such behavior?
In addition to what Alan Cox already mentioned, you might also want to find a spare power supply and plug that in temporarily. Capacitors to get old, dry out, etc. You might get lucky and it could just be that.
Another thing to do is check the motherboard carefully for burnt parts or leaky capacitors. There was a while (in about the era or your mobo) that manufacturers were using cheap junk capacitors that (from memory) would outgas forcing the rubber endcap off slightly and cause all the electrolyte out. Those caps normally bulged a bit and sat funny on the motherboard. They also had a visible pool of semi-dry goo around their base.
-wolfgang
On Monday 18 August 2008 13:24, Alan Cox wrote:
What could fail and induce such behavior? I have never seen anything similar before. A computer usually does boot completely or does not boot at all. I've never seen it boot halfway and then lock up.
Age, component failure , corrosion, static damage finally killing a device, fan failure ...
If its bust take it apart, completely. Earth yourself and then clean all the ram contacts, PCI and ISA card slots, tap all the chips firmly on the top and make sure they feel ok, check then fans seem ok.
Put it back together with the smallest amount of valid RAM configuration and no hard disks or PCI cards beyond the minimum and see if that passes memtest86. If it doesn't you can try reseating the CPU and the like but its probably game over.
If it boots like that add bits back until either its all back or it stops booting 8)
Thanks for the suggestions, I was also thinking of doing that. I took a spare dvd reader, hd, graphics card, power supply and some old sdram from the office, so I'll be able to remove all components but the motherboard and cpu. That should help localize the problem to one component, hopefully. :-)
:-) Marko
On Monday 18 August 2008 14:07, Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:
Marko Vojinovic vvmarko@panet.co.yu writes:
What could fail and induce such behavior?
Another thing to do is check the motherboard carefully for burnt parts or leaky capacitors.
Yeah, I know of the low-quality-capacitors-in-the-old-motherboards problem. But would the bios setup run with no problems with capacitors on the motherboard faulty? I'll look into it, but somehow I doubt that they are the cause. It is some part of hardware that gets initialized only *after* the bios, during boot. But then again, I can't be sure.
But anyway, thanks for the thought! :-)
:-) Marko
On Wed, 2008-08-20 at 08:27 +0000, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
On Monday 18 August 2008 14:07, Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:
Marko Vojinovic vvmarko@panet.co.yu writes:
What could fail and induce such behavior?
Another thing to do is check the motherboard carefully for burnt parts or leaky capacitors.
Yeah, I know of the low-quality-capacitors-in-the-old-motherboards problem. But would the bios setup run with no problems with capacitors on the motherboard faulty?
---- actually...yes
Craig
Marko Vojinovic vvmarko@panet.co.yu writes:
Yeah, I know of the low-quality-capacitors-in-the-old-motherboards problem. But would the bios setup run with no problems with capacitors on the motherboard faulty? I'll look into it, but somehow I doubt that they are the cause. It is some part of hardware that gets initialized only *after* the bios, during boot. But then again, I can't be sure.
I didn't buy a motherboard during the time they were manufactured with the faulty capacitors, so I don't know how the boards act when they start to fail, but I do know what it feels like when the capacitors in the main power supply start to fail.
My computer would boot and let me get into the bios setup with no problem, but it would randomly fail once up and running, usually when doing a big compile or running the cron tasks. As time when on, it failed with less and less provocation. Finally it stopped booting entirely. That is when I swapped power supplies and did a face-palm thing wondering why it took me so long to realize the PS was going bad.
-wolfgang
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:
Marko Vojinovic vvmarko@panet.co.yu writes:
Yeah, I know of the low-quality-capacitors-in-the-old-motherboards problem. But would the bios setup run with no problems with capacitors on the motherboard faulty? I'll look into it, but somehow I doubt that they are the cause. It is some part of hardware that gets initialized only *after* the bios, during boot. But then again, I can't be sure.
Sorry, I do have to ask...
I didn't buy a motherboard during the time they were manufactured with the faulty capacitors, so I don't know how the boards act when they start to fail, but I do know what it feels like when the capacitors in the main power supply start to fail.
What motherboard are you talking about...and what time frame are you certain was the time when it was manufactured with faulty capacitors?
My computer would boot and let me get into the bios setup with no problem, but it would randomly fail once up and running, usually when doing a big compile or running the cron tasks. As time when on, it failed with less and less provocation. Finally it stopped booting entirely. That is when I swapped power supplies and did a face-palm thing wondering why it took me so long to realize the PS was going bad.
And, how did you determine that it indeed was a capacitor that failed in your power supply?
On Wednesday 20 August 2008 15:14, Ed Greshko wrote:
What motherboard are you talking about...and what time frame are you certain was the time when it was manufactured with faulty capacitors?
What I know is not precisely for one specific type of motherboard. It's just that during the Pentium II / III era it was like general practice to put cheap capacitors on motherboards. Note --- *cheap*, not faulty. This means that the lifetime of some capacitors was as a rule far shorter than that of the motherboard, and the outcome was that motherboards often needed replacement after a year or so.
Some time after, manufacturers realized that this is not a good thing, and started implementing better quality (and more expensive) capacitors, so the motherboards stoped breaking every now and then.
OTOH, this is just general hear-say knowledge (some first-hand, I often had to deal with that situation on a number of motherboard models), I have no links/reports/technical info to support any of this...
Also, while my knowledge on electronics is fairly limited, I believe that capacitors are the one type of component on the motherboard that is most likely to fail after some time. Resistors, transistors and ICs have much bigger lifetime, in my naive opinion. And the very role of capacitors --- to iron out peaks in voltage or whatever --- puts them on the front line for bad external conditions.
Oh, and you can know that a capacitor failed by visual inspection (if it is deformed in shape and/or has traces of electrolyte flowing out) or by taking it off the motherboard and using an ohm-meter.
:-) Marko
On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 21:59:19 +0000, Marko Vojinovic vvmarko@panet.co.yu wrote:
On Wednesday 20 August 2008 15:14, Ed Greshko wrote:
What motherboard are you talking about...and what time frame are you certain was the time when it was manufactured with faulty capacitors?
What I know is not precisely for one specific type of motherboard. It's just that during the Pentium II / III era it was like general practice to put cheap capacitors on motherboards. Note --- *cheap*, not faulty. This means that the lifetime of some capacitors was as a rule far shorter than that of the motherboard, and the outcome was that motherboards often needed replacement after a year or so.
Marko Vojinovic wrote:
On Wednesday 20 August 2008 15:14, Ed Greshko wrote:
What motherboard are you talking about...and what time frame are you certain was the time when it was manufactured with faulty capacitors?
What I know is not precisely for one specific type of motherboard. It's just that during the Pentium II / III era it was like general practice to put cheap capacitors on motherboards. Note --- *cheap*, not faulty. This means that the lifetime of some capacitors was as a rule far shorter than that of the motherboard, and the outcome was that motherboards often needed replacement after a year or so.
Those caps were faulty besides being cheap, the company making them tried to "borrow" a "design" from someone else and the design spec they borrow was missing additive(s) that resulted in the caps having a much much shorter life. There was discussion at the time of whether the borrowing company got an early unfinished design, or whether the company with the working design "passed" them a design that was good enough to pass initial test and fail down the road.
See: http://www.geek.com/capacitor-failures-plague-motherboard-vendors/
And besides the p2/p3 era failure, a second failure from an expensive cap maker came along a couple of years after that and hit Dell and Intel MB's, Dell took write downs on the company reports of about US$270,000,000 that quarter. This was for the caps being faulty because they were overfilled (the formula was correct).
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
And as of 2005 there were still bad caps around as I have a video board with several bad ones one them that should have been built *AFTER* both of the above events (9/2005, the Dell event caps were built in 2004), and failed 4 of the caps after around 3 years of usage.
.
Also, while my knowledge on electronics is fairly limited, I believe that capacitors are the one type of component on the motherboard that is most likely to fail after some time. Resistors, transistors and ICs have much bigger lifetime, in my naive opinion. And the very role of capacitors --- to iron out peaks in voltage or whatever --- puts them on the front line for bad external conditions.
The caps with liquid in them have at best limited lifetime, though if built correctly will typically last longer than needed, a number of the MB makers are going to solid caps with no liquid in them just because of how difficult it is to make a small high capacity small liquid capacitor with a long life. If they did not have to be small, high capacity, and long life all at the same time there would not be an issue, making them physically larger would have reduced the stress on the component and increased the life.
Oh, and you can know that a capacitor failed by visual inspection (if it is deformed in shape and/or has traces of electrolyte flowing out) or by taking it off the motherboard and using an ohm-meter.
Generally it is obvious on visual inspection, especially if there is liquid/crusty material on the cap. Also if you have several identical ones and some of them look different that is a bad sign.
Roger
On Monday 18 August 2008 12:47, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
This is a rather old Celeron machine, 433 MHz with 320 MB ram. It was working properly up to a couple of days ago, when the first hd started dying out (which is understandable, given its age and the conditions it's in).
But then at some point the computer stopped booting completely --- bios starts (and runs properly, so to speak), then the os (it's windows, I know, I know) starts booting and does not pass the bootloader phase. Actually, I do not know exactely where it stops, but all I get is a black screen, even with no option for a safe mode or anything.
At first I just thought the problem was with the hd dying, but then the system failed to boot the fresh-and-tested Fedora 9 dvd. It spins up, the menu for installation appears (the text one, saying "type enter to install, type linux text to install in text mode" etc), and from that point the machine is locked up --- the function keys (which should provide extra info and help) do not work, the NumLock button does not toogle the appropriate led, nothing. It is frozen stiff, and all I can do is to reset it (ctrl-alt-del also does not work). Though, the dvd drive button does eject if pressed.
After a minute or two standing, it resets itself automatically, and starts over.
Ok, just for the record --- the problem turned out to be a rather rare situation of both hard drive *and* dvd drive failing simoultaneously. Once both of them were replaced, the machine came back to life. I figured this out by using Alan's approach of removing virtually everything unneccessary, and even substituting vital components with spares (dvd drive, memory and graphics card) one by one and in combinations, in order to find the failing component.
Thanks to everyone for suggestions and info, the issue is now successfully solved. :-)
Best, :-) Marko
On Fri, 2008-08-22 at 11:14 +0000, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
just for the record --- the problem turned out to be a rather rare situation of both hard drive *and* dvd drive failing simoultaneously
Two things dying at the same time makes me suspicious of the power supply. I'd be concerned that something else might go, too.
On Saturday 23 August 2008 07:19, Tim wrote:
On Fri, 2008-08-22 at 11:14 +0000, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
just for the record --- the problem turned out to be a rather rare situation of both hard drive *and* dvd drive failing simoultaneously
Two things dying at the same time makes me suspicious of the power supply. I'd be concerned that something else might go, too.
Of course, I share that suspicion. :-)
However, since I was to spend a whole afternoon plugging and unplugging hardware, I took the oportunity to do some upgrading with extra spare parts as well (more memory, network card, etc). And when I saw that the old power supply was declared with 135 watts max output, I definitely took the chance of switching it for a 350W one. :-)
So even if the power supply was the true cause of failure for hd and dvd, it is not an issue anymore.
Best, :-) Marko
Marko Vojinovic wrote:
Ok, just for the record --- the problem turned out to be a rather rare situation of both hard drive *and* dvd drive failing simoultaneously. Once both of them were replaced, the machine came back to life. I figured this out by using Alan's approach of removing virtually everything unneccessary, and even substituting vital components with spares (dvd drive, memory and graphics card) one by one and in combinations, in order to find the failing component.
When trying to troubleshoot these recondite problems, The first step is always reseat everything that can be wiggled. That means all power connectors, RAMs (used to be chips would creep up out of the sockets, modern RAM sticks seem to have solved that), cables to drives, etc. If that didn't fix it, I used always to remove everything but keyboard, video display all RAM but minimal to boot the BIOS. If I could get past POST, then add in a boot device which for me is a floppy my friend, less complicated. If that works, then add RAM back in one bit at a time (no pun intended). If all the RAM goes back in, then add one device at a time until it starts to fail.
With today's machines, that's more difficult. It's hard to take your printer port card out when it's just a piece of a chip on the motherboard.
In any case, it's always best to disentangle everything as much as possible and work with the minimal configuration which can actually be expected to run (in some sense of the word).
Mike