SATA - System Freezes

[Robin Laing]

Henry Ritzlmayr wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, den 19.06.2008, 09:52 -0600 schrieb Robin Laing:
>> Henry Ritzlmayr wrote:
>>> Am Dienstag, den 17.06.2008, 13:25 -0400 schrieb Jorge Fábregas:
>>>> Hello Everyone,
>>>>
>>>> I'm running Fedora 8 and my system freezes (for about 20 to 40 seconds) a 
>>>> couple of times a day. When it does I see this on /var/log/messages:

>> -- 
>> Robin Laing
> 
> What I didn´t like (still) is the fact that there is no indication, that
> this could be even slightly related to the power supply. As stated above
> it was more a try and error to solve this issue. Hopefully for the OP
> this also solved his issue. 
> 
> Question to the devs - could you think of any way that the kernel output
> could be a bit more informing, or don´t you get enough information from
> the hardware for such an issue. I also checked smart for unusual power
> cycle counts but to no avail. 
> 
> Henry
> 

Henry, it would be nice but if the system, including the BIOS doesn't 
know that there is a problem with the power supply, then how is the 
hardware supposed to report it.  Maybe there can be a sensor added to 
the harddrive to detect this type of error.

I didn't suspect a power supply problem the second time either as the 
power supply was fairly new (upgraded when I added more drives).  The 
sensors showed all voltages as being normal.  Even the BIOS said it was 
normal but under load and after the system warmed up, the power supply 
drifted to just under the lower recommended limit under no real load.

I have looked at how lmsensors works and you can make some changes to 
the configuration files to increase the accuracy of the reports.  I have 
not played with it much though.  It is just as easy to pull the cover 
and measure the voltages with a volt meter.

I have two of the same brand of power supply's (only ones available in 
our area) with exactly the same fault.  A known fault that can be fixed 
with the addition of three variable resistors.

-- 
Robin Laing