[NBLUG/talk] [CPLUG] Weirdness: BIOS POST lockups

[William Tracy]

Thanks for all the ideas, everybody. (Cross-posting to both CPLUG and
NBLUG was probably overkill, but I'm starting to freak out...)

I need to have access to the machine on Thursday, so I think I'll just
leave it running until then and start testing things afterwards.

A lot of the ideas people have posted don't *seem* to make sense,
though I plan on investigating them anyway.

The computer had been running fine before--the machine got a new
motherboard about two years ago, but I hadn't even opened the case
since then until after the problems started. I wouldn't expect
defective parts or weird wiring to suddenly cause a problem now.

The lockups seem just as likely to happen when I first power the
machine on the first time in the morning as when I reboot the machine
after it's already warmed up, so temperature doesn't seem to be the
problem. Gkrellm does report the processor temperature at 134F right
now--with everything running alright--but I suspect that the sensor is
calibrated a bit high.

The system is a lot more stable once booted than I would expect if the
memory were going bad. Firefox doesn't want to run more than about
three days continuously before it freezes up, and once in a while
Kicker will segfault and restart itself. Otherwise, I have no problem
running a full KDE desktop continuously for over a week. Still, I want
to give memtest86+ a shot at it sometime soon.

I'm quite hesitant to re-flash the BIOS (I'm not sure that I even can
without Windows), but I have noticed that after I swap out the power
supplies, the computer tends to stop wanted to recognize the keyboard
(PS/2) on boot. Once the OS boots up and loads its drivers, the
keyboard is fine, but I can't use the keyboard either during POST to
access the BIOS setup, or to change OSes in Grub. I can reset the BIOS
settings via a jumper on the motherboard, and then everything is dandy
until I swap PSU again.

There was a comment about USB devices that caught my attention, partly
because that sounds easy to test. ;-)

I have a USB extension cable that at some point shorted out somewhere
internally. I first noticed that the computer no longer recognized
devices plugged into the cable, then I realized that the computer
would freeze on boot when the cable was plugged in. I stopped using
the cable then, and I think it's now living on the floor somewhere
behind my desk.

The only USB device I have plugged into the machine right now is a
Logitech optical mouse. Once the machine is booted up, the mouse works
fine. It's plugged into one of the ports in the back directly on the
motherboard. It would be very interesting if that were the cause of
the problem. :-P

Anyway, here's some background on the machine, on the off chance that
it gives someone some ideas. It was custom-built by a gamer who sold
it to me a year after he build it, since it was no longer
bleeding-edge enough for his taste. :-P I believe the motherboard is
by Gainward, but I'd have to double-check that. It has three RAM
slots, all of them in use, and one AGP slot housing an nVidia GeForce
4 (I love that video card, but I digress). The processor is an Athlon
XP. There's a Maxtor 200Gb hard disk, a floppy drive and a CD-RW
drive. Looking through the window in the case, I don't see any
daisy-chaining of ribbon cable, but I've have to pop it open to be
sure.

Anyway, thanks a lot to everybody who's responded so far. At least I
have some leads to work on now. :-)

-- 
William Tracy
afishionado at gmail.com -- wtracy at calpoly.edu

"Whatever the missing mass of the universe is, I hope it's not cockroaches!"
                -- Mom