[nycbug-talk] Hardware annoyance

[tim jacques]

On 6/23/06, Marco Scoffier <marco at metm.org> wrote:
>
> I have a server, which has been solid for years (yes years)
>
> I put it into a colo and it has started randomly powering off,
> yes completely off.
>
> When I reboot the machine after one of these poweroffs the BIOS will get
> to where it initializes the Mylex Raid card (dac1100?) and then powers
> off again.
>
> If I unplug the RAID card the BIOS will complete its diagnostics until
> when it finds no system disk, no PXE boot etc.  So I unplug the machine,
> put the Raid card back in its slot.  Reboot and everything is ok.  RAID
> is fine sychronized everything.
>
> I finish the boot and everything comes up ok, mlxcontrol (FreeBSD 6.1)
> shows everything is hunky dork.  Basically I went through all the
> pulling the card, and rebooting stuff 5 days ago, ran memtest and
> crossed my fingers that I had fixed the hardware voodoo (perhaps
> something had wiggled and gotten unseated when I moved the server
> to the colo).
>
> Today the server is off again.  So I plan on going to the colo,
> removing the raid card and reinstalling a geom RAID straight on one of
> the SCSI channels.
>
> Is there something else I should check?  I wiggled the power cord and
> power connections this did not cause the server to power off.
>
> Could there be another reason for the mysterious power-offs?
>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> Marco
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Good afternoon everyone.

I had a box that ( after moving it ) displayed similar symptoms.
It would lock up during the post at one piece of hardware.
I removed that piece of hardware,  then it would lock at another piece of
hardware.
Sometimes it would lock at different parts of the post without changing
any hardware.  When it actually made it through the post, it would lock
somewhere in the boot/os load process.
A few times it successfully booted and loaded, only to lock in an
application.

An intermittent ghost in the machine.

The box is a tower with a slot processor (P3).

I removed the processor and reinstalled it in the slot.

The box has been rock solid since.

Apparently the bouncing around from the move backed it out just enough.

Good luck.

tim..
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