On 09/04/2017 11:46 PM, Sam Smith wrote:
On 08/28/2017 03:32 PM, Sam Smith wrote:
On 06/13/2017 02:27 PM, Sam Smith wrote:
On 05/12/2017 03:38 PM, Sam Smith wrote:
On 01/20/2017 08:04 PM, Sam Smith wrote:
I'll try to keep this short. I bought a used Lenovo T520 back in
May. It
had the motherboard with nvidia GPU. Because it sucks power and
doesn't
really have good suspend/resume support, I bought a used mother board
off of ebay that only had intel integrated graphics and I swapped it
out. All was well and I had installed in it 8gb +4gb of ram.
It ran like that for about 8 weeks before I bought an 8gb stick and
stuck that in, so then I had 8gb + 8gb of ram. After about 6 weeks of
running like, it randomly rebooted overnight. I shrugged it off and
thought maybe the power went out or something (even though it had a
battery in it). But then about 2 weeks later it did it again..and then
two weeks after that. So I pulled out the new 8gb stick I had put
in and
let it run with just one 8gb stick. It ran like that for about 10
weeks
without a problem. I put the old 4gb stick in just for fun,
bringing it
back to the original 8gb + 4gb configuration. But about 2 weeks
later it
rebooted again. At that point I bought a matched 16gb kit (8gb + 8gb)
from new egg that seemed to come recommended from google searching for
compatible ram for this model. But just a couple of days ago (about 3
weeks after installing it), it rebooted by itself.
I am kind of at a loss here now. I can buy another motherboard and
swap
it out again, but that takes a few hours and I don't feel like
doing it.
The cooling and thermal stuff is all good on the laptop,I've ran
prime95
and video encoding for hours and it is fine (temps stay below 80* at
least, normal usage is 40-55*). I've also ran memtest for a few hours.
What I find weird is that the machine suddenly reboots. At least a few
years ago, ram issues would just lead to a kernel panic screen. But
with
this, the machine is just like someone pulled the plug and rebooted
it.
I started to wonder if there is some built in watchdog somewhere that
will reboot the machine if it hangs, but I can't tell? Other than
that,
if this is the kernel that is rebooting the machine, is there any
way I
can get it to dump some info somewhere before it fully reboots?
Before I
go through the pain of swapping the board again, I'd just like to
really
know that this is a hardware issue and not the kernel detecting
something and just choosing to reboot...
Thanks for any info,
Sam
Just an update. My uptime is now 80 days and I haven't had any random
reboots. The only thing I did was pull in the latest apt-get updates
(which took me from Jessie 6.6 to 6.7 I think, but also installed a
newer xorg-intel driver from backports). I also read somewhere that
there were some "issues" with having the hardware virtualization
extensions enabled in BIOS (can't remember what the issues were) so I
disabled those after running the apt-get upgrade and rebooting.
Never gone this long without a reboot so I guess perhaps I'm good. But
if this was indeed a software caused reboot, I'd like to know what
setting I need to change so that debian would just hang at a kernel
panic screen (or something similar) instead of just an instant dump and
reboot leaving me thinking that it is hardware issues (which it may
still be....)
Regards,
Samuel Smith
Guess I spoke too soon. About 10 days after I posted the above, the
laptop randomly rebooted. :sigh:
And for my hopefully final update..... I upgraded from jessie to
stretch and about 2 weeks after that I got a random reboot. Figured
that ruled out any software issue. Went ahead and bought a new board
off of ebay and judging by the lack of a serial number in the bios
screen, I'd say it was from an old stock pile destined for RMA
warranty repairs. Nonetheless, after a month of swapping the board,
I've not had any further problems.
Well I guess I really spoke too soon.... Just got a random reboot a
minute ago... Pretty much at a loss now. The only thing that hasn't been
replaced now is the CPU, battery, and power adapter. I do have a spare
battery and power adapter. Guess I'll try running with those for a month
or so and see what happens. Though not really sure how either one of
those would make the computer reboot randomly once a month. Laptop is
mounted in a docking station. At least for the last 6 months, every
reboot was while it was docked. But I do remember times last year
sitting at the kitchen table undocked and getting a reboot so I don't
think the docking station is the issue.. But have no idea now :/
Regards,
So for my usual 6 month update:
Still scratching my head on this one. So far, tried various different
ram, replaced motherboard, same issues on two different OS's (jessie and
stretch), a few months a ago replaced battery with a brand new official
one, tried various different power adapters... and still get the same
random reboot.
For the last couple of months, I seem to get around the problem by
rebooting the laptop once every two weeks, and right after reboot I
suspend and then resume. Seems if I just reboot it and let it sit there,
it will reboot on its own after a couple of days. Otherwise the random
reboots seem to always happen after being on for more than a month or so.
The only thing left is the CPU. Not sure if I am going to mess with it
anymore though. I did find some "unofficial" bios versions out there
that people have modified and tweaked various things at that level.
Sounds risky, but I do still have the old motherboard so if I totally
trash it by flashing I could always put that one back in (which would be
the 4th time I've had the motherboard out lol) I need to flash bios to
get the new microcodes for the spectre cpu flaw stuff anyway...
--Sam
