Author: Philip Stubbs Date: To: hampshire Subject: Re: [Hampshire] Help trouble shooting sudden 'go slow'
2008/6/9 Damian Brasher <lug@???>: > Philip Stubbs wrote:
>
>> Can anybody tell from this meagre description what may have gone wrong?
>
> Sounds very much like some part of your hard-drive internal electronics
> have degraded.
Thanks for your suggestion. However, I fear that the hard drive is not
at fault. I have tried booting a live CD (Ubuntu 7.10), and it behaves
in the same way. That is, very slow, as if my 1.7GHz processor is
suddenly only 200MHz.
I have looked in dmesg, /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog and
/var/log/kern.log and found nothing that may indicate the problem.
The only thing that looks a little odd is the output of 'cat
/proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature' does not seem correct. After
running the machine for some time, I decided to power down to swap the
hard drive with an old one I have. The bottom of the machine was very
hot. Therefore, I re started the machine so that I could test the
temperature. This time, the fan was running full time. Initially the
fan exhaust was very hot, but after a little time it cooled, but the
fan did not turn off as normal. Checking the temperature it read a
constant 65, but the fan exhaust indicated that it was much lower than
that.
My current theory is that something has gone wrong with the thermal
controls of the processor, and maybe it thinks it is overheated, and
has throttled the processor into a safety mode. When I check cat
/proc/cpuinfo, it indicates that the processor is running at 1700MHz,
but the performance is far below even the normal low speed of 1200MHz.
Can anybody suggest what else I can try before I throw this machine
out the door?
