Random freeze after years of service

[Ragnorok]

- I've been custom building computers for fifteen years, and this is one I built about five years ago. It was my primary system running XP Pro for about three years, used for DVR and video editing, then it was mothballed for two years after being replaced by an Athlon X2 system. Originally it had an Adaptec IDE Raid controller and five hard drives, four striped on Raid and one boot drive, but over the two year offline time two drives were popped out and put into other computers.
- After the two year hiatus I pulled it out of mothball and put Linux on it for embedded device development. Nothing Linux liked the Adaptec controller so I popped it out and put the three remaining drives right on the mobo controllers along with a floppy (yup still have one) and a DVD drive.

- In went FC9 and all was good. For an hour or so. Then it locked up cold. No mouse, no numlock, no response on the serial console, nothing what-so-ever. After a bit of floundering around I put in memtest and ran that. This *also* locks up randomly, as evidenced by the fact that the "Wall time" counter stops. When that happens it's dead as a door nail.

- I've popped and reseated everything in the system, including the CPU, twice now. I'd expect bad RAM to show up in memtest, not crash the system, so it's something else. I just don't know what else. Since it crashes running memtest there really isn't any other component (hard drive, etc) in the loop at that time.

- Any suggestions? In fifteen years I've never seen this happen before, and I have hardware I built ten years ago running Linux headless as a file server. Thanks for your time...

Ragnorok

Video is an old ATI AIW 7500 w/ 128MB or so. 512MB RDRAM. Three 40 GB hard drives. HP DVD burner (one of the first, firmware updated about three years ago). Dual floppy drive in one enclosure. BIOS updgraded about three years ago as well. Oh. Mobo is an Asus P4T533-C; P4 HT 2.26 GHz CPU.

 

[evongugg]

Welcome to the forums!

May be the power supply.

 

[Ragnorok]

- Thanks evongugg! I happen to have a spare I can pop in, long as the connectors match up. (grin) I'll give that a go and see what happens.

Ragnorok

----
Wouldn't that be "Scruze my engrish?" (wink)

 

[geofelt]

Is it possible that the thermal grease has dried out over time, and that the lockup is due to the cpu overheating?

 

[Ragnorok]

- Nice geofelt! I'll check that out, as my spare psu does not in fact match up for the main power connector ... it's got four extra pins and is missing a white wire in the rest of it. The old psu is also CAKED with dust. I'm going to clean it and see what happens. (chuckle)
- Thanks!!

Ragnorok

 

[evilshuriken]

Hey ragnorok, I've replaced several dead power supplies for people in the past. They all had one thing in common, they where all caked with dust just like yours, I think since most consumers don't ever clear the dust out of their pc it builds up on the cpu cooler and the psu.
With so much dusk hindering airflow, heat builds up when the pc is running 24/7 and the psu eventually gives out.

 

[Ragnorok]

- Yeah. When I saw that I was pretty shocked. (wide grin) I clean the computers on an irregular basis, but I've never seen a psu simply crammed with caked-on dust before. 'Course this is the first computer I've owned that sat on the floor right *next* to a heater vent for three years, so it stands to reason it would be pretty bad off, but apparently only after actually seeing it. (owlish look)
- I've got my fingers crossed that it's not really toast, simply unhappy with its lack of heat dissipation. Time will tell, or it won't.
- The annoying thing is this other psu is literally brand new. It came from the replacement (for this system) because that one was a bit light on "oomph" for my taste. I may see if I can find a mapping from one connector to the other and rewire it, just for the heck of it. I'm all over cobbling a solution using existing parts rather than spend more money on it, especially if I get to attack things with the soldering iron (wolfish grin)...

Ragnorok