Odd machine behaviour

[Phil Dobbin]

On 12/03/2012 11:05 PM, Phil Dobbin wrote:

> On 12/03/2012 09:38 PM, Ric Moore wrote:
> 
>> On 12/03/2012 03:58 PM, Colin Law wrote:
>>> On 3 December 2012 19:02, Phil Dobbin <bukowskiscat at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> ...
>>>> As for hibernation, I've ruled that out after reading what Colin wrote.
>>>> I went through all the logs the other day with a fine tooth comb & found
>>>> nothing whatsoever so no clues there.
>>>
>>> If the log just stops, so there is nothing in the log indicating any
>>> problems, you just suddenly see the reboot start, then a hardware
>>> problem is a good possibility.  If possible you could try running the
>>> memory test for an extended period.
>>
>>
>> Sounds like a power supply problem. Ric
> 
> Good points both. Wheezy has a very elaborate grub menu in its splash
> screen (Plymouth?) with all sorts of options for memtest & the like.
> 
> I'd overlooked that. I'll give it a whirl.

Mystery solved although to be fair, it wasn't much of a mystery.

It was down to the disk failing. Despite passing virtually every test I
threw at it (although HDSentinel expressed doubts on its health), it was
just about to fail.

I had backups, full bare metal backups courtesy of mondoarchive & daily
ones via duplicity, so I decided to install Lubuntu 32-bit 12.10 on it
to see if it was a Gnome 3 problem. The Lubuntu installer started
complaining immediately about disk I/O errors & then gave up completely
in pretty short order.

I find it odd that I didn't find any clue about the disk health in any
of the system logs (I had a CentOS server that fell over then re-booted
itself once or twice & by looking in the logs, it was apparent that a
disk failure was on the cards). I suppose I should've booted from a
System Rescue disk (Knoppix or somesuch) & I'd would've found out sooner
but I'll bear it in mind for the next time.

Thanks to everybody for their help.

Cheers,

  Phil...

-- 
currently (ab)using
CentOS 5.8 & 6.3, Debian Squeeze & Wheezy, Fedora Beefy & Spherical,
Lubuntu 12.10, OS X Snow Leopard & Ubuntu Precise & Quantal