chriscrutch wrote:
>
> Good thought. Unfortunately, that produces the same result: big crash.
> Thank you for the reply.
>
> --chriscrutch
>
>
Some things to try, maybe we can narrow it down some more.
You say that
dd if=/dev/cdrom > /dev/null
crashes the system. This implies something with the cdrom drive itself,
cabling between drive and motherboard, or motherboard (several things, but
that’s later)
My apologies, but your thread was ‘moved’ and while I do remember reading
the initial posts, they’re somewhere else… so if I ask a question that’s
already been answered, I’m sorry.
What speed drive is the cdrom?
Does this crash occur with ANY CD in the drive? or just THIS particular CD
in the drive?
In what manner does the computer crash?
Is it a hard lock?
Spontaneous reboot?
Spontaneous poweroff?
Garbage on screen, then one of above?
Does the following affect your system:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=512 count=2M
It copies 1 Gig of data from /dev/zero to /dev/null. no cdrom involved.
It’ll likely take up to 2 minutes to finish, depending on speed of your
machine, but it’s a good indicator.
If THAT crashes your machine, I’d say you have a heat issue based on cpu
load, check the ‘goop’ (yes, I know it’s really called Thermal Paste,
preferably with suspended colloidal silver particles… nyeah!)… check
the ‘goop’ between your cpu and heatsink. clean and replace as necessary.
Oh yeah, a thought… make sure the little fan on the motherboard which
cools the ‘northbridge’ chipset is running properly. Mine died a few
months ago and I got really weird data errors all of a sudden. It handles
ALL the I/O data between the various busses, and it can get quite warm
quickly. (and could conceivably contribute to this problem…)
Is it a DVD-rom drive (or DVD writer… does it handle DVD’s?)… if so, do
you have a 40conductor cable on it, or an 80conductor? The higher data
transfer rates of a DVD drive really need the 80conductor cable to keep
crosstalk down. Spurious interrupts and data requests can confuse the
system.
I’ve sort of given a grocery list of things to check and try… hope it’s
not overwhelming. Rather have you try several things and come back than do
it one at a time (sooo slooowww!).
Your mission Mr. Phelps… (this computer will self-destruct in 30
seconds…) (yeah yeah, not funny)
Loni
–
L R Nix
lornix@lornix.com