[ale] Losing stability

[Christopher Fowler]

I had a system that would sporadically reboot and sometimes lock up.
It had 2 drives in it.  One was good and one was bad a year before.  I
installed a new drive and copied everything over a year before this
system starting failing.

I made a mistake....

I forgot to move swap from the bad drive.  Eventually when the drive
really starting failing the swap was failing too.  This made the machine
behave badly.  

As I said before I typically toss a machine behaving badly.  I tore down
the computer and got all my data off the good drive.  After all this
tear down I finally figured out what was really wrong.  Not a big loss.
The FDD was bad.  The CD-R and CD-RW had finally failed on me earlier.
I could not do much with this machine other than use it as a simple
workstation.  I threw it away and now use my laptop at my desk when I
ever go into the office.

If I had realized that the issue of swap on the bad drive needed to be
fixed I might still have that junker and be using it.  Can't cry over
spilled milk.  It was a cheap Ginstar box anyway.

On Tue, 2006-10-31 at 09:04 -0500, Watson, Keith R. wrote:
> I recently had a system with similar symptoms. It would start to boot,
> produce a beep that didn't resemble any of the beep codes, then hang or
> automatically reboot without any of the usual post messages. It took a
> while to find the problem. The front panel power switch mount was broken
> so when the button was pressed the switch didn't change states
> completely. I fixed the switch mount and it has been working fine ever
> since.
>  
> keith
>