[CentOS] died again

Thu Nov 28 07:17:10 UTC 2013
Michael Hennebry <hennebry at web.cs.ndsu.nodak.edu>

On Thu, 28 Nov 2013, Eliezer Croitoru wrote:

> 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)

'Tis there.
Don't remember what it said, except that 12v was 12.0v.

> 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).

The one I found is 98 pages.

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

I saw something about aperature size.
Is it how many memory addresses allocated to AGP?

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

That means the floppy drive?
I have one.

> 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.

Not tempted.  My machine was somewhat high-end when I got it.

> 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$.

Fargo, ND.

> 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.

The current setting, which I think is the default,
is Plug and Play OS no, which meands that
the BIOS configures things instead of the OS.

> 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.

The second drive has been there for a long time.
It might have even been an option when I first got the machine.
There are still two empty slots on the rack.

> 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

I have no basis for comparing with other desktops,
but I can see that I will need to open it.

> one) while it's off the network grid and make sure that all capacitors
> are in a good shape.

> I am almost sure that this CPU is a 32bit and if you don't need(like

Correct.

> many) the fancy GRAPHICS and some additions that was added to the latest
> and shiny releases of Fedora then 14 is just fine.

Even if F14 still got security updates,
I'd still want to know why CentOS has been crapping out on me.
It might affect F14 eventually.

> 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.

I got a bunch of orphan node once,
but since then, fsck has been giving the partition a clean bill of health.

> 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).

-- 
Michael   hennebry at web.cs.ndsu.NoDak.edu
"On Monday, I'm gonna have to tell my kindergarten class,
whom I teach not to run with scissors,
that my fiance ran me through with a broadsword."  --  Lily