[CentOS] died again

Thu Nov 28 03:37:13 UTC 2013
Eliezer Croitoru <eliezer at ngtech.co.il>

Hey Michael,

I would try to check it up from bottom up and note that each time it 
fails you may have an error popping out later.

The first thing is to check voltage in the BIOS.
Then if it's by percentage 12V should be between 11.9 to 12.1 when these 
are quite not the best thing to have if possible.
Also take a look at the 3V and 5V to make sure that all the voltage in 
the machine is in the acceptable percentage which should be about 1-3% 
off the 12.0 3.0 5.0
( It should be there in the BIOS)

The next step is to verify that the memory is not in high "performance" 
settings which can be high voltage or unverified settings.
Most D865GBFL should work with most memory chips and cards out of the box.
I do not remember if these boards do have memory settings in jumpers but 
since it's a P4 I would assume it's possible to see those (not yet 
finished to read the whole 142 pdf).

Try to adjust the agp Aperture size to lower then 64MB (16).

In the Hardware monitoring try to see what is the CPU heat which should 
be up to 70C but in some cases will show 90C+ but it's due to sensor 
failure.

The next step will be to restore the bios defaults settings and 
disabling the 1.44 (unless you have one).

This is the BIOS level I can think about from the product guide side.

The next step is to make sure you have backups for what you need (just 
as a regular basis task that should be done)

Also don't be tempted to replace this beast with a ARM\ATOM or any other 
suggestion that might not understand what a 3.2 P4 can do that the BEST 
ATOM cpu cannot.

I do not know where you live at and there-for the price can vary from 
one place to another and which can be over 200$ and over 300$.

This machine is not described as Linux compatible by INTEL and which can 
or cannot be a reason for anything and the change of Plug And Play flag 
in the bios might help to solve some problems\issues.

It is possible that the power supply was a bit loaded using two disk 
devices and which can cause some system freezes when a high load is 
there on it for a long period of time.

To make sure that the power supply is there and working properly not 
harming any hardware you should open the case (if it's an easy to open 
one) while it's off the network grid and make sure that all capacitors 
are in a good shape.

This is a point which you should understand this beast is old and since 
it works on 3.2 Ghz some parts might have gotten old but not necessarily 
needs to be replaced.

In a case you are replacing anything you should take couple parts together:
CPU
RAM
Power Supply.
Fans.

Sometimes it can sound a drastic change but it is recommended since 
there are couple unknowns in the picture which I would prefer to not 
discover as a fact.

I am almost sure that this CPU is a 32bit and if you don't need(like 
many) the fancy GRAPHICS and some additions that was added to the latest 
and shiny releases of Fedora then 14 is just fine.

On the next fedora release I would like to hear from someone there how 
many times in 5 years he replaced his chairs or his drill for example.
(I assume it was not done 5 times over all these 5 years)

You can look up on the software level 4-5 times but still each time the 
machine got stuck some information was not written to the FS and it 
happens while sometime causes a problem to read a file.

The basic badblocks tool can help you discover if there is a problem 
with the software accessing any of the drives.
Note that it happens that access to a DISK can be because of a cable 
sometimes.

In a case you want to make sure that the problem is in another level 
then the DISK you can try to work with a LIVE dvd\cd not touching any 
DISK IO while working on the PC.(this machine do not have USB boot 
support the last time I checked).

I do hope it will help you to find the right path with your PC.

Regards,
Eliezer

On 25/11/13 18:58, Michael Hennebry wrote:
> The computer is a DakTEch Freedom 4 P4 DDR System.
> The system board is a D865GBFL w/LAN,audio & video
> Processor Intel Pentium 4 3.2 Ghz 800FSB
> I got it in 2006.
> I switched to CentOS because Fedora will not install on it any more.
> Fedora 14 is the last I was able to install.
> Installation has almost always been a tremendous hassle for me,
> so I've usually not gone with the latest
> and greatest until my current nears EOL.
> I've read that a kernel bug is the reason that I could not install F16.
> Supposedly it had been fixed by F17, but no go.