Wednesday, March 21, 2007

grumpy powers down spontaneously

After I determined that the FX5200 in grumpy was bad, I swapped in an older Matrox card. I'm not sure if that's related, but Grumpy would not stay up for more than a few hours. It would just shutdown, similar to entering hibernate mode, particularly when I'm not doing anything on the system at that time. The problem is that I also can't wake it up, unless I hold the power button for 30 seconds or so. Only then I can power up again. and of course, I don't want it to shut down in the first place.

At first I suspected heat problems in the cpu. I tried cpuburn, within seconds got the cpu up to more than 90C until the kernel spew out temperature warning messages to the log and entered moduled frequency, i.e. ramps down the CPU frequency to reduce the heat. No such log entries exist from other shutdowns, so I don't think that's my problem.
When grumpy shut down again on me, I swapped in a new FX6200 card with TV out that I picked up today. So far it hasn't shut down on me. We'll see. If it's still up and running when I come home tomorrow I decalre victory and blame some interaction of the Matrox card with the motherboard. I'm not sold yet.

On a related note:
When I boot with the new card I get console output, so he physical connection to the TV works. However, as soon as X is enabled, the TV screen goes black. X is running because I can her the KDE login music, I just can't see anything. Frustrating.

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