[kwlug-disc] Troubleshooting and Fixing a PC locally?

[Charles McColm]

On Thu, 2010-12-02 at 18:36 -0500, Khalid Baheyeldin wrote:
>         > The symptoms vary from having nothing on the monitor, to
>         booting hanging
>         > at "scanning for USB devices" (before trying to read the
>         disk), to booting
>         > and working well only to hang up suddenly after a few
>         minutes.

It still could also be a bad sector on the disk or RAM issue. Memtest86+
is a great open source tool for testing memory (and is on almost every
distro out there) and we usually go directly to the manufacturer of the
hard drive for disk testing tools (e.g. Seagate for Seagate drives).

Heat does sound like it could be an issue. If you want to watch it
without a load on the system just go into the BIOS, there's normally a
place to watch the CPU temperature and the rpm of all connected fans.

It's possible it could be a driver issue, but we've only seen problems
like this with certain ECS motherboards and those were problems we had
from the beginning of use.