Guest jab51270 Posted December 2, 2002 Report Share Posted December 2, 2002 I have an interesting problem...If I shut my system down for more than a day it will not reboot. I have to go through several manual shutdowns just to get it up and running again because it continually freezes. It does this with graphical, failsafe, and nonfb (I hope that's right). Once I get it up ang running, everything is fine. I can even shut down and reboot with no poblems. Any suggestions? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mtweidmann Posted December 2, 2002 Report Share Posted December 2, 2002 From what you've said it sounds very much like a hardware problem. It could be several things though. I'd guess its your hard drive. Try opening up your case, and listening to your drive when as it starts up. Especially when the system has been off for a long time. What does it sound like? It could be that its seizing up. If it is your hard drive then it will need replacing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest jab51270 Posted December 2, 2002 Report Share Posted December 2, 2002 My hard drive is fairly new, and I have never had any problems with it. If I go out of town again I'll shut the system down and remember to listen at boot upon return. It has also been suggested to me that it could be my system battery. The box is over 2 years old. Could the system battery lead to this kind of problem? What's more is, I have other distro's (SuSE 7.2, 8.0) on the same machine with the same config and hardware, and had no problems what-so-ever. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted December 3, 2002 Report Share Posted December 3, 2002 Always go to the most obvious first. Power supply, whether a faulty switch or flaky because of the auto protection, my guess is the switch. Replace your power supply. It is not the system battery, nor is it the hd. Battery almost always shows up as a time keeping problem, and the hd would do funny stuff after booting. Power supply. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted December 3, 2002 Report Share Posted December 3, 2002 That was my idea on the other board. Given the age of your computer(two years), I don't think your battery is going. When the system battery starts to go, the bios setup has a tendency to reset itself to default values if the computer is removed from power and later restarted. By removed from power, I mean pulling the plug out of the wall or killing the power on the power strip. When you do that the battery has to deliver power to the bios setup memory. If it fails, you lose that info and the next time you power up, the bios will reset itself to its default values. If you made changes in your bios setup you can check to see that they are still there rather than the default values. I agree with mtweidmann that it certainly sounds like a hardware problem and apparently one that is only bothering Mandrake and not your other OSes. That could point to a hard drive problem with only the area of the hard drive where Mandrake is located being affected. If you know the make and model of the drive, you can download a diagnostic utility from the manufacturerer's website. Basically, you just download the proper utility, click on the downloaded file and you are prompted to insert a floppy. The diagnostic utlity is then copied to the floppy which you can boot off of and run diagnostics to thoroughly check out the drive and repair bad sectors if necessary. One thing that might help narrow things down is if you could identify where in the boot process the system freezes while booting Mandrake and any error messages you get. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mtweidmann Posted December 3, 2002 Report Share Posted December 3, 2002 The reason I guessed at it being your hard drive is that it only affects you when the machine been off for a while. So its likely to be something that moves and has become seized up. For example one of the fans in my mahcien is getting old, it makes loads of noise at boot time, but is happy after a few minutes. If its only affecting Mandrake and nothing else, then in all likely hod it is the HD. If you can find some utility software for it that should help. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest jab51270 Posted December 3, 2002 Report Share Posted December 3, 2002 I'll post the error messages I am receiving this evening, and I'll try to run the diagnostic tools from Maxtor as well. Thanks so far for the help. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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