Hardware Problem, Best Way to Diagnose

[Andy Green]

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Jess Anderson wrote:
| I'm having ongoing crashes and unrepeatable errors in
| routine scripts. Memory has checked out find repeatedly,
| so is not especially suspect.
|
| My current prime suspect is the hard disk system, either
| the onboard SATA controller (VIA), the disk drive itself
| (Maxtor) or the OS (FC3).
|
| I can show that data on the disk has changed since it was
| written, that is, originally it was correct but now it
| is wrong -- a date field that was "1998" is now "19)8".
|
| Could I be looking at a bad block, perhaps? If I understand

You would be getting errors in /var/log/messages in this case.

For this kind of problem heat is often the cause.  Examine your CPU fan
and make sure it is working all the time.  If you have acpi, keep an eye on

cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM/temperature

or whatever you have after thermal_zone/.../temperature

Did you seat the fan yourself?  Did you use thermal paste?  Have you
removed the fan and not applied thermal paste again?

Run it with the lid off, keep and eye on the CPU fan and see if it
changes anything.

- -Andy
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