[mythtv-users] Troubleshooting Help Needed

[Greg Woods]

On Thu, 2009-05-07 at 11:54 -0500, Russ Chambliss, Jr. wrote:
> I need some help diagnosing whats wrong in a myth box that has
> overheated. 
> 

As others have pointed out, you need to find the cause of the
overheating first. The reason it's freezing is most likely because it is
still running too hot and the BIOS is shutting down the CPU to keep it
from killing itself. 

If your BIOS has a hardware monitor, try running that for a while. That
would show up things like dead CPU fans without having to open it up.

Finding the cause of overheating may or may not be tricky. I've got a
machine (unrelated to my Myth setup) that will overheat every time I try
to do a full backup on a particular file system, and almost never (once
or twice during normal operations when it was a really really hot summer
day and the room A/C couldn't keep up) at any other time. Other file
systems, some larger than the bad one, back up just fine. I've also
tried doing this file system with the case open and fans blowing into
it, but it still overheats. Weird. If I monitor the CPU temperature
via /proc, I can watch it slowly rise until it gets to about 63 degrees
C, and then the system freezes. I really have no idea why backing up one
particular file system makes this happen so reliably. A hardware guy I
know suggested that I try a different CPU fan, but I haven't gotten
around to installing it yet.

--Greg