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Black Screen of Death ?


scoopy
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Since my install of MDK 10 CE, my machine has rebooted on its own maybe twice (similiar to a windows stop error). Today, I was just reading a web page and *poof* I am staring at a black screen and had trouble getting it started again past the initial post.

 

Any ideas if this could be a kernel 2.6 thing, video driver thing (which was the case with my windows stop errors awhile ago) or maybe some hardware problem?

Edited by scoopy
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The steps I take in a failure like this:

1) video driver

2) RAM

3) video card

4) bios/northbridge

 

If it is windex, I always reinstall it after 1! B)

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Thanks Ix,

 

I think that somehow confirms my thinking, which is more a combo of three of those factors. A new kernel, with an old video card that isn't really supported by the newer video drivers. I have had problems getting the latest nVidia driver to work (one of the 5000 series) and settled on the 4620 "patched" version.

 

I decided to replace the tnt2 32 meg card with a gForce 4000 128 meg, so hopefully that will take care of this. (Then I can also finally replace that S3 virge 4 meg card in my other box ;) )

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  • 2 weeks later...

I was wrong... doesn't look like it was video related (unless this is a new problem now). Have since replaced the video card, but, although the sudden reboots have stopped, the sudden *poofs* have not.

 

What's new is that it gave me beep code that I found confirms a memory problem according to SOYO's website. So, moving on to Ix's step #2... I will be swapping ram and running memtest and see what that tells me.

 

I have also found that my USB drive is now unreadable by windows, tho Mandrake still sees all my files. Windows is reporting a CRC error #45 and that it is unformatted. Partition Magic sees it as formatted Fat32, but empty. So there... It works in Linux, but not in windows (na na na :P ) This seems like a possible side effect from the memory error ???

 

Any ideas how to go about fixing this CRC error?

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Because of ram and paging, I would correct that first before doing any other move. Bad memory can do all sorts of odd things, not to mention drive you insane! B)

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Well, it passed memtest86.

 

and while it was running, I was thinking, it could just be the new game we installed thats causing these latest crashes. I don't remember doing anything else the last couple of days when it happened.

 

Will just have to keep an eye on this for a while... as I burn and backup that stuff on the USB drive. (only got like 38 gigs out of 40 gigs capacity of stuff)

 

Meanwhile, I keep cruising that highway of insanity. :juggle:

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  • 4 weeks later...

How's this for a fix for my "Black Screen of Death" and *poof* problem...

 

New coat of thermal paste inbetween the processor and heatsink ?

 

I ended up taking it all apart and found it appeared to have a sub-par contact in this area. (The original was a peel-off strip supplied by the original heatsink. Suspecting this could cause instability (thanks also to plati in #musb) I picked some 10% silver thermel past (not as cheap as I thought) and put it all back together. Things been running smooth ever since... and about 10 degrees coolor too! :D

 

The only other thing I noted when tearing it apart was that two of the cards (sound and nic) did not quite slide out like th others. They more like "popped" right out as opposed to sliding out (hard to describe, but...) I thought maybe somekind of short going on here, but when I seen the difference in running temperature, I credit the thermel paste more for the fix here.

 

Moral of this story... Don't overlook the little things ?

 

thanx again,

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