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#1 2018-05-01 23:36:16

nannerpussy
Member
Registered: 2017-02-15
Posts: 96

Finding cause for semi-random system resets/powering off

A few weeks ago my Arch desktop began randomly rebooting, although it isn't truly random because it only seems to occur when I have both a high CPU load (compiling from AUR for example) AND have an increased load on my video card. The video load can be as little as having an open Wine instance of League Of Legends' login window or watching streaming video like YouTube, but I haven't experienced a shutdown or reset while only compiling. Could be coincidence though, it's hard to say, which is what this post is for.

The odd thing is sometimes it shuts off completely, sometimes it reboots into the BIOS, or just resets like I hit the reset button. This leads me to think it could be a bunch of different shit, like a failing motherboard component (a capacitor or faulty solder bridge for example) rather than the CPU or GPU. Temperatures are not high, dmesg leaves no trace of anything, system logs do not show anything critical before it happens.

What's the best way to go about probing and testing as many components as possible without the use of a physical CDROM? I found Inquisitor, which is Debian-based, but unable to be dd written to a USB stick and remain bootable. But what else is out there? Are there tools in the AUR I'm not seeing? Ideally I want to boot into a live distro and run a battery of tests over a couple hours to see if I can find the problem. It must be able to keep a record of what set off the reset if it fails during testing, but if Arch isn't seeing it, I'm afraid nothing will. There would be no point in testing to find failure, getting failure, but never seeing the cause.

Edit: Using 4.16.5-1-ARCH but am about to see if this happens with the LTS kernel. Chances are this is unrelated to the kernel, but wanted to note that.

Last edited by nannerpussy (2018-05-01 23:43:13)

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#2 2018-05-02 05:03:06

x33a
Forum Fellow
Registered: 2009-08-15
Posts: 4,587

Re: Finding cause for semi-random system resets/powering off

It could be power supply issue. If you have onboard graphics, then try to get rid of your discrete graphics card and see if you can reproduce the issue. Otherwise, try changing the PSU.

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