[ILUG] A frustrating system (hardware?) failure: any tips on how to resolve

[Michael Conry]

I'll look into the ultimate Boot CD option too for general hardware
testing, hadn't heard of that (thanks Kingsley).

Looking bit more like hardware of one type or another...  I created a
boot-USB for Ubuntu 8.04 (last version I had working stably, wanted to
test that according to Steph's suggestion).  Booting that on the
problematic machine it first crashed at the keyboard map selection
screen, then second attempt it got to the package selection stage but
crashed during that.

So, in short I have a system that used to run 8.04 fine, and now
refuses to run 8.04 or lucid or debian-stable... which all looks very
like a hardware issue of some sort.

I'll be working through the suggestions: memory, checking CPU cooling,
BIOS upgrade, when I can grab time during the week.

Thanks to all for the generous and helpful advice,
Michael

On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 8:22 PM, Kingsley G. Morse Jr. <change at nas.com> wrote:
> Hi Michael,
>
> You can test a variety of hardware components with
> a free live CD called "Ultimate Boot CD" from
> ubcd.sourceforge.net.
>
> For example, it found an AMD CPU that went bad in
> my computer.
>
> I expect it could test your new hard drive.
>
>
> If it finds broken hardware, fine.
>
> If not, it's probably a software bug, and you can
> search google's indices with keywords from stack
> traces like
>
>    start_secondary c1e_idle default_idle native_safe_halt machine_check mce_panic
>
> I wouldn't be surprised if other people here are
> right that the new operating systems need to be
> run with something like noapic or noacpi.
>
> Thanks,
> Kingsley
>
>