Rob Malpass wrote:
> Hi all
>
> I'm suffering an apparently random shutdown which could be to do with
> many possibilities - can someone check my logic. The machine is very
> new - and highly enough specified (Sempron, 768Mb RAM) but has
> exhibited a couple of problems. It's now running Ubuntu 7.04
> (recently upgraded from 6.06 to 6.10, then to 7.04) but none of these
> recent upgrades have causes these problems. [On a related note -
> full marks to Ubuntu for their upgrades - no problems whatsoever and
> it even kept my large fonts which I promise is a real Godsend].
> Anyway, back to the plot:
>
> 1) When not in use, under no load, it sometimes powers down without
> warning.
> 2) When not in use, again under no load, it has started to make a loud
> whining sound.
>
> As far as 2) goes, I've disabled the CPU temp warning and that seems
> to have fixed the sound. Obviously this points to the thing
> overheating but the fan is working and there's no dust, and all the
> expansion slots are uncovered so there shoult be plenty of
> ventilation. I'm thinking the only solution here is to buy a
> separate fan. Am I right here? I should point out it does have a
> couple of quite old hard drives (one of which has the "click of
> death") - but see below - I don't think it's the HDDs.
>
> As far as 1) goes, I've looked in power management and I've not asked
> it to shut down at any point. I've also looked in the user log
> (/var/log/user.log) and I get the interesting error "GConf server is
> not in use, shutting down" which seemed to occur around the time it
> shut down on its own (I wasn't in the room at the time). I've found
> a couple or (unanswered) articles thanks to googling for that error -
> but not found a solution. Can anyone suggest a suitable line of enquiry?
>
> Last thoughts - if I need to buy a new fan - never having done so in
> my life - what sort of things do I look for - should I buy one that
> connects to the motherboard, or one that goes straight to the power
> supply?
>
> Cheers
> Rob
The CPU temp warning is the clue here! The motherboard will detect high
CPU temperature and shutdown before Linux could do anything. I have a
similar problem. After opening the case, the CPU fan had come loose. I'd
replace that first ~£10 and see if it solves the problem.
John.
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