System Locks up overnight

[RobF]

Hi Guys,

Just saw this thread.

I had this once.

My machine was left on ( I cannot remember if movies were playing or not).

I heard the fans speed gradually increase and keep increasing.

I have come across this behaviour before when I fitted a bad Atto SCSI card whilst upgrading a G5 to a SCSI drive; (fitting a good card solved the problem).

Hugh described it as a "kernel panic".

The odd thing is it happened when I was doing absolutely nothing at all with the machine but I was in the room working on something else.

Pretty sure this was on G21.

The interesting thing is the machine it occurred on doesn't have a SCSI drive, just a WD Raptor (Richard its the one you gave us).

At the time I just hit the reset button sharpish as the speed of the fans was increasing in an unhealthy manner.

It has not occurred since and I though nothing more of it until now.

Rob

[samsc]

fans going on means total system crash or hardware failure.
usually intermittent.

Nothing to do with Catalyst or pixelmad.

recent os builds have not seen this happen so much for me.

i had a broken fan on a graphics card that used to cause this to happen.
heat....

[samsc]

Came up with an idea to check whether its an OS install problem or a hardware problem.

Solution:

Buy a new hard disc.

1. Install totally new system on disc

2. if the computer still crashes - its a hardware fault

3. if the computer doesnt crash - its an os install problem.

[tylerr]

Seems to me that i could just swap the scsi drives between 2 machines and see if the problem moves. The only bummer there is that the bad machines brother is going to Austraila for a gig. It will have to wait a bit.

Tyler

[samsc]

did you update the flash roms in the atto cards?

they definitely did several rom updates last year.

on the atto site - this is refered to as firmware

http://www.attotech.com/

they also did driver updates as well.

[tylerr]

done all that.

[samsc]

is this thing still crashing - a lot - like every few hours?
or just occasionally?

[samsc]

we both know this is some kind of intermittent hardware failure.

its tough to debug with so many permutations of the components involved.

when i worked at V*L it always used to be the cables and connectors that failed the most - in the most difficult way to debug

[Spam Butterfly]

Just a note on SCSI adapter cards:
The driver updates and firmware updates go hand in hand. It's not enough to check one or the other - do both.

Hugh