SCOUG-HELP Mailing List Archives

<< Previous Message <<

Date:	Tue, 17 Sep 2002 22:48:53 PST7
From:	"J. R. Fox" <jr_fox@pacbell.net >
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: System Failure

Content Type: text/plain

=====================================================
If you are responding to someone asking for help who
may not be a member of this list, be sure to use the
REPLY TO ALL feature of your email program.
=====================================================

This is for Steven, or anyone else who is able to get involved with
hardware issues.

I had a system failure today -- the first since this box was rebuilt
with several new components in June -- and I'd like to figure out what
went wrong. It is an all-SCSI system. Basically, this box runs 24 /
7, and it has been a good couple weeks since it was last turned off.
I had had the Warp 4 boot running for several days. Yesterday was
especially hot here in the Valley, and apparently also fairly humid,
as those are the days when my A-C tends to get overwhelmed, and cannot
entirely cope. But the system ran that whole day, with no evident
problem. However, late this morning, I was several hours into some
work when I heard a noise from the hard drive that sounded sort of
like repetitious swapper activity (and like it "wasn't quite
connecting"), which would be very uncharacteristic. I have 512M of
RAM. Then, everything that was running just locked up, and I could
not even shut down. One Reset attempt partially brought back the OS,
but the desktop was non-functional, then it went all blue, and then
there was some sort of "The System is stopped. Contact your
Administrator." kind of things, but the whole screen was mostly random
garbage, so I didn't even try to write it down.

After that, Reset attempts could get no further than a BIOS notice to
the effect of "Incorrect termination or faulty cable. Rectify and try
again." At this point, I thought the best idea was to power off for a
few hours.

If something had actually gotten fried, I shouldn't be able to type
this for you now, right ? My guess was that this could very well be
something heat related, and hopefully transitory. (But then, why did
it crash _today_, when the temp was 10 degrees cooler than yesterday,
and the A-C was working much better ? I have the side of the case off
right now. All the connections look fine. Tom'w. I will make sure
that no fan has died.

One other thing that was rather curious. The Popuplog seems to have
ballooned suddenly around this time, with many NS 4.61 crash entries.
And yet, NS kept functioning through it all, right up until everything
went down.

I lost about 3 hours of work this morning that never got saved, and
system reliability is quite important to me. If possible, I'd like to
prevent a recurrence.

TIA.

Jordan

=====================================================

To unsubscribe from this list, send an email message
to "steward@scoug.com". In the body of the message,
put the command "unsubscribe scoug-help".

For problems, contact the list owner at
"rollin@scoug.com".

=====================================================

Return to [ 17 | September | 2002 ]

SCOUG, Warp Expo West, and Warpfest are trademarks of the Southern California OS/2 User Group. OS/2, Workplace Shell, and IBM are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation. All other trademarks remain the property of their respective owners.