[Sderby] Finding a hardware fault

[Mike]

On Fri, Nov 06, 2009 at 05:16:13PM +0000, John Talbut wrote:
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> Hi
> 
> I appear to have a hardware fault that is causing occasional segfaults.  My
> initial problem was that I could not get a kernel to compile.  I was referred to
> http://www.bitwizard.nl/sig11 and following steps there it appears that it is a
> hardware fault.  Iceweasel (i.e. Firefox) also segfaults fairly consistently if
> I try hopping around YouTube.
> 
> My system is a fanless hush Mini ITX with a VIA Nehemiah processor.  I am using
>  Debian testing.
> 
> I thought CPU overheating might be a problem, but extra cooling (blowing air
> over the external cooling fins) did not make any difference.  The internal
> voltages seemed to go rather low, so I changed to a more powerful power supply.
>  I have changed the RAM.  I have run memtest86+ overnight and it shows no faults.
> 
> So I am looking for suggestions as to what to do next.  There is not much more I
> can change apart from the motherboard, but I would want to be sure there was a
> fault on it before I did so.
> 
> I have tried running strace on Iceweasel but there does not seem to be anything
> consistent about what happens before it segfaults.  My guess is that it may not
> be Iceweasel itself that is hitting the hardware glitch.
> 
> Is there some way of tracing all of the last, say, 20 operations before there is
> a segfault?  Or any other way of diagnosing the hardware fault?
> 
> Any ideas?
> 
> John
>

Well, these things are usually hardware and usually RAM.  So you have
two choices.  First, you could run some diag software and see if it
identifies anything as faulty.  I'm told Microscope 12 is good.

The other way is to reduce the machine to bare minimum of components and
then swap out until you solve the problem.  You should be able to get it
down to mobo, PSU, RAM & HDD.  Well, you've already swapped RAM & PSU,
so that leaves mobo and HDD.  Obviously you don't want to shell out on a
new board if you don't need one.  I'd try a rebuild as that will be
cheap :-)  Failing that, it catagorically leaves you with mobo and HDD
and I bet you a pound to a pinch of salt that it's the former.

Mike.
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