[Justcop]

My newly installed XBMC live on an IDE hard drive keeps freezing after between 1 and 20 minutes and then requires a reboot.

I have tried a different hard drive and this had the same problems.

I think it is a faulty IDE port on the motherboard because I was having problems with this earlier. The other one is completely dysfunctional so I can't compare. How would I go about ruling this out as a cause. Are there any specific logs I can check (I'm a linux newbie).

I'm also having an ocassional problem where sometimes before the freeze the XBMC logo comes on the screen and the program returns to the home menu. This can happen several times in a row.

I have considered that maybe the graphics card is the problem but am still not sure. I have tried it in a different windows machine and it works fine. The card is fanless and does appear to be getting quite hot but when I crudley attached a case fan which kept it ultra cool the problem continued. I also tried switching in the only other card I have which is one of those ATI cards that seems to have driver trouble so I couldn't enter XBMC. I tried ftping a large file over to it whilst on this card and it managed to get through 25 minutes of transfer without a hitch.

The freezes don't seem to relate to what I'm doing, has happened during boot, in the console, in menus and during video playback.

Mobo won't boot from USB so I can't test without IDE by that method and I have no free SATA drives.

If I boot from live CD and it loads up fine, what access does it require to the CD drive. Perhaps seeing if live runs without a freeze will tell me that it is the IDE drives.

Any other components that could cause this?

[Justcop]

bump... can anyone help me. This is verry annoying, I'm so close!

[althekiller]

Please don't bump your own threads in less than 24hrs.

Why not try a full install of ubuntu and installing xbmc from the PPA. At least that way you should be able to get at useful debugging info more easily.

[fasteddy]

Have you considered that you have bad ram? Random resets and hangs are often related to memory.

You can check for many different hardware related problems with, for example, the ultimate boot cd.

The first thing, though, is to test your ram.

[databit]

Hey Justcop,
Can you post your full hardware specs?
If you sit at the home screen without going into any menus or loading up any menus (basically boot up and don't touch it) does it still lock up or is it just when you are watching videos?

[Justcop]

OK to answer questions and fill you in on the current state of play

System Spec:
Abit NV8 Motherboard
AMD athlon 64 2800+(1800GHz)
2 x 512MB DDR RAM
XFX Geforce 8500GT Fanless Graphics card
Linksys 54g internal Wifi WMPGV41
Antec Basiq 350W PSU
Have tested 4 different spare hard drives.

Memtest86+ done - found no errors
Added a IDE HDD -> SATA adapter to remove use of IDE port - no change

Turning on the system and do nothing freezes very quickly, within about 10 minutes.
Used nvclock to detect GPU temp. 2 minutes before the freeze temp was 65 degrees and had been increasing at a fast rate.
When I crudely attach a case fan to GPU freezing takes over an hour when doing nothing. GPU temp at this point ~45 degrees, I just did this test now and the freeze was together with flashing caps lock and scroll lock keys, ie kernel panic. It also happened yesterday with GPU fan attached during a movie, this caused no flashing keyboard lights and numlock light did not respond to pressing.

Have had on a number of occasions they system alarm going off. It is not programmed to do this in the BIOS settings, could this be hard built into the graphics card? CPU during alarm was at 55 degrees which appears normal for my system at all times. I haven't done extensive testing to reproduce the alarm but it has occurred after a reboot from a freeze when booting XBMC and also three times in a row at the same point when I was attempting to install windows for diagnostic purposes. Always happened at the menu asking me what partition I want to use for the installation.

I also have a problem where when browsing menus or in the console, XBMC resets, going straight to the XBMC logo and reloading the homepage. I have also had several random full reboots when browsing menus.

Another possible unrelated problems is that during movie playback the movie often stops and returns to the menu I was in. I am guessing that this is because its not streaming fast enough across the wifi network, or could this be related.

My next step is to try a new grapgics card. I have one with a fan on its way in the post.

I am concerned that whilst this problem does appear to be associated with the hot GPU, cooling it down doesn't appear to solve the problem. Does anyone have any ideas where I should go from here?

[Justcop]

freezing is now much quicker even with crude fan attachment.

I did get an error dump in the console when I booted up from one freeze, see here
and I have also started to get artefacts when working in the console, see here

What do these errors suggest?

[althekiller]

Looks like your gfx card is screwed.

[Justcop]

I'm still suffering this problem as my replacement video card is yet to arrive to test.

Was wondering, now that 9.04.1 uses a full ubuntu installation on fixed disks, what features can I use to help me debug. I'm still not convinced its the graphics card as it work perfectly in windows.

[Justcop]

it was the RAM