How to diagnose freezing system?

[Arianyr]

Hi all


My brother has a system running Fedora 10. He's loving linux and all that, but occasionally he seems to suffer from system freezes. The system just locks up. No ctrl+alt+backspace or anything works, forcing us to resort to a hard reset.

My question is: how would I go about diagonosing the problem? Is it possible to recover some console output of some kind kindly spouting out the line 'hardware x is broken, replace it and your system will be freeze-free!'?

As always, any help would be greatly appreciated.


System specs
Dell Dimension 8400
32-bit 3400 single-core processor.
2 GB 4200 DDR2 RAM
250GB SATA HD
Geforce 9800 hybrid power

[devils casper]

Have you installed proprietary Graphics Driver?
Execute this

su -
lspci | grep -i vga
grep -i driver /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Post output here.

[Arianyr]

I installed kmod-nvidia (which I believe are the open source drivers)

lspci | grep -i vga

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 9800 GT (rev a2)

grep -i driver /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Post output here.

Driver         "kbd"
Driver         "mouse"
Driver         "nvidia"
Driver         "nvidia"

[devils casper]

You are using correct driver and it means problem is not because of Graphics Card.
Check Memory sticks now. Memtest is available in Installation CD/DVD and GRUB Menu. Check if it shows any error.

[Arianyr]

I ran memtest86+ from the GPartEd livecd and it came out without errors.

[yancek]

You might try removing graphics card and re-seating it, do the same with RAM chips. If you get the freezing problem after being logged on for a short time, it could be an over-heating processor. Does this happen only when using particular programs or is there no apparent consistency?

[coopstah13]

I would also check the power supply as well. How many watts is it?

[Arianyr]

Ah, thanks for the responses

I've tried reseating RAM and graphics card, I even tried simply placing in other RAM, but the problem remains.

The power supply is only 350 watts though, that might be the problem (the original computer only had a ati x300 card in it which doesn't require a power connection). I got a 500W lying around somewhere, I'll try and see if that's an improvement.

The problem usually occurs when he's playing World of Warcraft through wine, but it's also happened when just using firefox.

UPDATE
Ah, I noticed something.

The system seemed to hang again, but this time it still responded to the workspace-switch shortcut. I opened up system monitor. CPU load was fine, RAM usage was fine. What I noticed though, was that this time world of warcraft's state was listed as 'futex_wait'

Update
Set up a little dual boot with Windows XP and the same problem occured. Must be a hardware problem then. I'm gonna try replacing that PSU next