Why system rebooted

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From - Thu Aug 12 06:36:57 1999
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From: mrsmiley@hotbot.com (Kenneth McCormick)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sco.misc
Subject: Re: Why is my system rebooted?
Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 17:15:30 -0700
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Recentky, michaelgaul@mindspring.com said...
|One of my company's customers had such a problem: His system would reset
|at random times during the day for no apparent reason: it would behave as
|though
|someone had hit the "reset" button. This started happening all of a sudden,
|after many
|years of successful operation with the same system, os, etc.
|
|The symptom persisted after he changed his multi-port serial board, cabling,
|motherboard,
|power-supply, etc.etc.  After many months the puzzle was revealed:
|
|(1) His company was built over a subway line. The system would tend to
|reboot
|when a train ran underneath.
|
|(2) Shortly before the symptom originally appeared, "the electricians" had
|made some
|changes to his building's wiring.
|
|It turns out that in doing so they had disrupted his "earth" ground. This,
|combined with the
|electrical fields from the train. managed to couple to his reset signal.
|
|
|robertwane@hotmail.com wrote in message <7oo3gv$g6s$1@nnrp1.deja.com>...
|>Please help me!
|>    I have a DELL PowerEdge 6300 with SCO Openserver 5.0.4 and RS504C
|>and OSS469B(OSS469C can not be installed) installed, and sometimes it
|>will reboot automatically without any information , any reason.
|>
|>
|>Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
|>Share what you know. Learn what you don't.

Cool story.  If Robert doesn't have a subway running below,
nor a shorting power cord nor loose cable, etc., 
what he's experiencing is a catastrophic hardware failure due
most likely to his master interrupt controller.  Software failure
would be caught by the kernel, kernel failures would yield a kernel trap,
often seen on NT as the blue screen of death, but certain hardware failures
can't be caught and cause the system to spontaneously reboot.  These failures
corrupt the bus and the system reboots without any notice.  This used to 
be caused, more often than not, by video cards and loose chips on the mobo, 
but as system MHz has gone up, the interrupt controller and the cmos now tend 
to conflict.  This conflict happens when the keyboard or mouse trys to raise 
their interrupt.  The poorly constructed Winbond W83977xx master interrupt 
controller, that is used on almost every modern motherboard, is responsible.
Look for it near the ISA slots towards the back of the mobo.  There are
many many posts to the comp.periphs.mainboard.abit ng about these
exact kinds of problems.  I have seen it many times over the years, and
the problem goes away with a new mobo, preferable an Asus for me.
Of course you are welcome to swap out every single piece of hardware
one at a time with identical working prieces as I did many times, but
it always seems to be the mobo when I see this problem.

Kenneth

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