Arch Linux

rubik

Member

Registered: 2012-03-23

Posts: 104

Laptop reboots itself: hardware issue?

Every time I power my laptop on, after 5 minutes or so, the laptop reboots itself. What's more is that it does this *at least* 3 times before it stays actually on. It also randomly reboots after some uptime.
There are problems when the laptop is suspended as well. Sometimes, after I open the lid the laptop awakens from suspension, but the screen is completely black and no key is working. Nothing happens.

Now, this laptop is fairly old, so I'm ok with hardware issues being there, but I'd like to find out what's wrong. I read online the the first thing is to check some log files, but most of the time the mentioned log file isn't present on my system. Here's what I have in /var/log:

ConsoleKit  mongodb  samba              Xorg.0.log      btmp    faillog  ntp.log     redis.log  wtmp
journal     old      speech-dispatcher  Xorg.0.log.old  btmp.1  lastlog  pacman.log  slim.log

The file faillog seemed interesting, so I run the faillog command, but it displayed 0 failures for everything. Is there anything I can do to narrow down the problem?

rubik

Member

Registered: 2012-03-23

Posts: 104

Re: Laptop reboots itself: hardware issue?

No one has a suggestion?

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,612

Re: Laptop reboots itself: hardware issue?

You probably want to look in the journal. .
Note that the wiki article I linked shows that the commands are run as root.

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