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Date:	Wed, 30 Oct 2002 12:47:11 PST7
From:	"J. R. Fox" <jr_fox@pacbell.net >
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: Another system failure

Content Type: text/plain

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Hi All,

I recently was offline for a day or so, due to my 2nd. (apparently
heat-related) system failure, since this P-III / 850 desktop system
was rebuilt with several "new" components back in June (main board,
RAM, new CD/R, 1 of the 2 hard drives being new, the slower SCSI cable
also being new); the quote marks are because the mb was purchased as a
working pull said to be in primo condition, and one of the two prior
hard drives was re-used. The Granite Digital LVD SCSI cable that
serves the hard drives is a carry-over, in service since 1997. It is
a fancy one (low resistance teflon, or somesuch, able to support up to
3 H/Ds) that would be expensive to replace, should that prove
necessary. The system has a good fan between the two H/Ds, plus the
one in the power supply, plus the cpu-cooler, which are all working.
I've had the front cover OFF since the last failure, and the system
seemed to run fine 24/7 for approx. the last 4 weeks or so.

This failure was kinda weird. One recent morning, I found my screen
saver still running (I do usually turn the monitor Off overnight, or
during extended hours of non-use), but everything else was dead as a
doornail ! Couldn't get out of W4 any other way, so had to use the
Hardware Reset. Reboot attempts were No Go, even DOS. I could see
the system getting past the point where the 2 SCSI cards sign on, the
slow one listing the LUN assignments for the devices it controls, then
the two H/Ds reporting in. And that's where everything stopped -- not
even an error message. This remained the case through 3 further
Resets, then on the 4th. it went one small step further, to the error
message familiar from the previous system failure several weeks ago:
"Faulty termination or cable. Please rectify and try again." There
shouldn't be anything _permanently_ faulty with either, or else I
wouldn't have been able to run normally for the past month. I did
what I did last time -- shut down for a few hours, which in this case
turned into a day. And things are working again after that, with no
other steps having been taken. (But now I have the side panel Off for
a while, also.)

As we discussed last time, evidently something does not have, or no
longer has, the basic heat-tolerance that it should have. Zeroing in
on exactly which component is the culprit will be tricky. I am going
to guess that it is not something on the motherboard, as I expect that
would kick in earlier, and manifest differently. I doubt it is the
2940 U2W. This time, I did not get to hear the
struggling-for-thermal-recal sound I clearly heard during the first
failure, because this happened overnight. Correct me if I'm wrong,
but doesn't this leave as the leading suspects the fast SCSI cable or
its connectors, or drive electronics on the 9G boot drive ?

Any of you folks who are hardware proficient, I'd really like to get
to the bottom of this. This is the only system I'm running at the
moment, and I depend upon it.

TIA.

Jordan

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