My machine keeps on powering off intermittently!

rapichai · n00b Joined: 27 Aug 2003 Posts: 5

I recently bought a Gateway 600XL laptop.

It has a Intel Pentium 4 M 2.6GHz cpu, 1024MB Ram, Intel 845MP chipset, and a ATI Radeon Mobility 9000 64 MB video card.

I have succesfully installed Gentoo linux 1.4_rc4 on it. Everything works great so far, except my machine will power off intermittently.

Initially I thought it might be a problem with ACPI or APM, so I compiled a kernel without them. This did not solve the problem.

After looking through /var/log/* for oops messages, I didn't find anything
that looked like it was causing this behaviour.

I originally installed the 'gentoo-sources' kernel on the machine, so i thought I might try the "stable" 'gs-sources' kernel to see if the problem lied in the gentoo-sources kernel. This also did not solve the problem.
Has anyone experienced this type of behaviour before?

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

drjimmy42 · Guru Joined: 03 Feb 2003 Posts: 512 Location: Nashua, NH

Have you tried it with any other OS successfully? Are you sure its not a hardware problem with poor battery charge or something? Maybe try compiling apm back in (or as a module so you don't have to keep compiling) and check the battery state.

rapichai · n00b Joined: 27 Aug 2003 Posts: 5

mickwd · n00b Joined: 04 Jun 2003 Posts: 70

Is it an overheating problem ?

Continuous compiling a length of time will put a heavy load on a machine (on processor, memory and disk), and may cause a laptop to get so hot it shuts off to prevent hardware damage.

This would be more likely on AC power than on batteries, as the laptop would tend to run in a lower-power (i.e. cooler) mode to help prolong the battery life.

See if you can get any temperate measuring programs (e.g. lm-sensors) installed.

If it is an overheating problem, one thing to check is that the laptop vents are free (it can be easy to block them by using a laptop on a soft surface).

Jimboberella · Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2003 12:20 am Post subject:

Doubtfull that overheating would be the problem as the P4 will just slow down till the temp drops.

It is probably still an ACPI issue. Try explicitly turning off ACPI in the bios and/or on the grub/lilo kernel command line.

rapichai · n00b Joined: 27 Aug 2003 Posts: 5

Is there still ACPI code in the
kernel even if you configure it
without ACPI or APM support?
I've already tried compiling kernels
without support for either.

I don't think it is a problem with
overheating because, the machine
made it through the complete installation
process (lots of compiling there).

At first I thought it might be
XF86 radeon drivers causing the
problem due to coincidental occurances
of 'radeon_unlock' messages in
/var/log/kern.log as the last message
before machine shut off. However it
has also happened when X was not running (no radeon message).

I am running FreeBSD 4.8 now and have
had no problems with machine shutting off so far.

It is a shame that I could not get
gentoo to be stable on my laptop. I was
really looking forward to having vmware
and win4lin. Since the machine just
shuts off (no panic), nothing useful
gets logged.

I have not tried any other linux distros,
so I am unsure if this is a problem
with kernel or gentoo.

Well.... I am still stumped.

rapichai · n00b Joined: 27 Aug 2003 Posts: 5

[identical to previous message].

RangerDude · Guru Joined: 19 Apr 2003 Posts: 301

Listen to this.
My old notebook couldn't work with mandre 8.2. It kept going into sleep mode! That was damn annoying, it would happen in the middle of typing. It wasen't a timeout, but just random sleeps about every 2-5min.
The funny thing, was that it only happened when the network was connected.
No traces of anything in any log. I never solved it as I went to debian where the problem wasen't there.

kronon · Apprentice Joined: 11 Aug 2003 Posts: 212 Location: NL

That is damn anoing. Any way, I also think it's something with acpi /power management. Have you disabled every thing at powermanagement? Are you sure you are using the kernel you think you are. Or maybe you compiled some of the powermanagement modules and that the kernel automodprobed those.

How far do you get when starting gentoo? beyond kernel?

rapichai · n00b Joined: 27 Aug 2003 Posts: 5

Yes it is unbelievably annoying as you can already imagine.

I am sure that I configured the various (gentoo-sources and gs-sources) kernels without ACPI or APM support. I also confirmed that no modules were loaded (lsmod).

The system ran fine.... everything (X11, dvd playback, etc) worked fine except for that one annoying thing.... intermittent power offs!!!

I was thinking of trying to install the redhat-sources kernel, but..... my machine shutoff

At that point, I installed FreeBSD 4.8.

Thus far, everything is working equally as well as Gentoo... except DVD playback.

I am using Ogle, and it was better on Gentoo/Linux (except when my machine died).

It is slightly laggy at times on FreeBSD.

vhkristof · Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2003 5:17 pm Post subject:

Had, the same problem ...

I fixed it with:

mickwd · n00b Joined: 04 Jun 2003 Posts: 70