[mythtv-users] [OT] occasional lockups

[Andrew Gallatin]

My mythtv box has been locking up occasionally.  It has always been a
little bit flakey due to the crappy windows driver for my marvell
based wireless card.  To increase stability, I've recently taken to
not loading ndiswrapper by default.  Unfortunately, I'm still seeing
lockups.  I can't say the lockups are more frequent, since I've just
finally gotten the box working the way I like, so it is on quite a
bit more now than it ever was before.

The box is a 3.0GHz HTT P4 (northwood), 160GB SATA, MSI Neo-2V
motherboard, 512MB dual-channel ram, Air2PC (old style) and
Dvico Fusion HDTV5 tuners, Dlink PCI wireless, fanless NV5200 AGP,
Antec SONATA case w/380 Watt PSU.

The lockups are interesting in that the power led goes dark, but the
fans are still running.  When it locks, there is no response to
keyboard input (even magic sysrq), and the video card's signal is
dropped.  There is nothing in /var/log/messages from the kernel
about an oops, and there are no overtemp warnings.

The last time it locked up was on Tues night.  It had just just spent
2 hours recording something on both of its HD tuners, and was 9.42
into recording L&O SVU on the Air2PC with the Dvico idle.  It had just
started commflaging on a 720p show.

My first guess would be that my PSU doesn't quite have the "oomph" to
handle all the hardware.  But then again, its only one disk, and this
is a northwood, not a prescott.

My second guess is that there is an overheating problem.  I've never
seen the linux kernel issue cpu throttling message on this machine,
but I can't manage to measure the temperature either.  My attempts at
getting lmsensors to work resulted in a confused Nvidia driver that
locked the machine up.  And the acpi is not good enough to have a
thermal zone.


Any idea what the power led going off might be trying to tell me?


Thanks,

Drew