[Gllug] Diagnosing hardware faults

[general_email at technicalbloke.com]

On 28/11/10 21:55, Chris Bell wrote:
> On Sun 28 Nov, John Edwards wrote:
>    
>> On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 06:35:45PM +0000, Alain Williams wrote:
>>      
>>> On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 05:39:41PM +0000, Tethys wrote:
>>>        
>>>> I believe one of my machines to have developed a hardware fault.
>>>> It intermittently[1] exhibits one of three behaviours:
>>>>          
>>> Can you get a console on it (non GUI), anything appear as it dies ?
>>>        
>> VGA consoles can die before you see any error messages, so
>> hooking up a serial console to a remote machine and getting
>> the kernel and syslog to send important logs there can help.
>>
>> The Shuttle boxes are small and some do not have good air flow,
>> especially around the hard drive. Running lmsensors and hddtemp
>> at regular intervals could spot any heat problems.
>>
>> The other possibilities are CPU, motherboard, RAM (memtest will
>> not catch errors that occur under load) and the PSU. Of these
>> the most likely to fail is the PSU. If you are lucky then you
>> may have a motherboard where lmsensors can monitor voltages.
>>
>>      
>     If it is an overheating problem would it suffer in the same manner as
> laptop graphics processors, which can unsolder themselves from the
> motherboard? Friends of mine 1st Components in Park Royal may be able to
> help, www.1stcomponents.com.
>
>
>
>    


Apropos of motherboard repair, do you know if they "re-ball" the chips 
with leaded solder or simply "re-flow" them with what is already there. 
I could really use a repair company that can do proper re-balling at a 
reasonable cost!

Roger
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