Hardware lockup - need suggestions for diagnosing

David Ecklein dave at diacad.com
Mon Dec 11 18:47:56 EST 2006


Larry-

I am betting (not on a sure thing) that the motherboard is the site of the
problem.

One possibility hasn't been mentioned - bad aluminum capacitors.  There was
a huge number of bad ones a while back due to defective electrolytic being
supplied to motherboard manufacturers.  The caps tested OK, but would fail
systems in weird ways after being in use for a while.  Sometimes you could
see a brownish deposit where a seal blew.  I have come across several such
motherboards (but not in laptops - I try to stay away from them).

I am not sure what the dates were on this - but if your machine was
manufactured before the problem was caught...

If you can get a good look at your aluminum caps, you might be able to see
whether any look "funny" - if so, they are fairly cheap to replace as a
trial solution.

The little tantalums were not an issue on that electrolytic snafu.

Dave E.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Larry Cook" <lcook at sybase.com>
To: <gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org>
Sent: Monday, December 11, 2006 12:25 PM
Subject: Re: Hardware lockup - need suggestions for diagnosing


> Dan, Ben, Ric, and others that replied directly,
>
> Thanks for your replies and suggestions.  Here's is what I've done and
> know so far:
>
> Hard drive - I removed the hard drive and disabled it in the BIOS.
> Still have the problem.  (And yes Ben, I've already backed up the user
> data.  Thanks for asking.)
>
> Disable things in BIOS - I disabled the few things that the BIOS lets me
> disable: power management, legacy usb, minipci, serial port, auto-wake,
> and a few other things I don't recall.  Still have the problem.
>
> Memory DIMMs - I tried with only one DIMM and even tried a DIMM from
> another DELL Latitude laptop that has not had any problems.  Still have
> the problem.
>
> Video - Dan suggested using a Live CD and just trying the console.  How
> do I do that?
>
> External warming - Not sure how to do this other than light a fire in
> the fireplace, but that might tempt me to throw in the laptop! :-)
>
> Reset connectors, etc. - Haven't tried this yet.
>
> eBay - I did a quick check and found a dozen or more of this model, both
> fully working and partial systems.
>
> Memtest86/86+ - (Ben, thanks for the links.)  This is last since this is
> what I spent most of my time on.  Both versions of memtest behaved the
> same.  When the system is stone cold (off over night), memtest does not
> finish writing it's initial text to the screen before it locks up.
> After it's been left sitting for 15-20 minutes I power off and then on
> and memtest finishes writing all the text, but the elapsed time never
> increments, although in some cases test #0 did update with a non-zero
> percent complete.  After it's been on a while longer and I power off and
> then on it eventually gets to test #5 [block move] and hangs.  This
> consistently happened if I let the tests run w/o intervention.  If I hit
> 'c' and run tests #6, #7 and #8, they all pass.  I even let test #6 run
> for 32+ passes as the web page says is needed to hit all patterns.  The
> one interesting thing is that after running test #6, I hit 'c' and
> selected test #5 and that ran multiple passes w/o a problem.  But if I
> power off and on the computer hangs on test #5.  This was pretty
repeatable.
>
> Does any of this memtest behavior indicate any specific component?  Or
> do others have additional suggestions?
>
> If I can't solve this, I'll be going the eBay route.
>
> Thanks,
> Larry
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> gnhlug-discuss mailing list
> gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
> http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
>



More information about the gnhlug-discuss mailing list