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Ubuntu machine restarting randomly.

N

NLight

Junior Member
I have a small machine which uses a mini-itx Biostar NM70I-847 and runs Ubuntu and is primarily used as a media center with XBMC. Ever since I built it 6 months ago it's been experiencing random restarts. Ubuntu itself isn't restarting, the machine just seems to lose power and then reboot. The strange pattern that I've noticed is that it has never restarted (as far as I can remember) whilst XBMC is playing a video, but it does often restart when the machine is doing something else. In the course of a day it could restart several times. However, I have left it on for several hours without it restarting. In the months that I've been using it, I have not found any pattern to the restarting.

I've checked the temps and nothing seems to be out of the ordinary. The fans all work fine. I'm struggling to come up with any explanation that would explain why it has never restarted whilst XBMC is playing a video. Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but given the time frame, it seems unlikely.

I'd appreciate any help.
 
I've reseated the ram a couple of times before, but it had no effect. Is there a way of testing RAM for issues? I haven't got a spare stick to test.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for your responses guys. I ran memtest for 7 passes and there were no errors, so I'm assuming memory is fine. I should mention the test itself ran for around 10 hours and the computer didn't restart.

In the past couple of days, I've had XBMC playing some videos to try and notice a pattern to the restarting. It got through the entirety of The Lord of the Rings Extended editions without restarting a single time, except when I occasionally paused it. Today again I've had XBMC playing and in the two times I've paused it, it's restarting within a minute of it being paused.

It seems that it's more likely to restart when it's been playing a video and then paused, than when it's sitting idle doing nothing. I'm thinking it has to be something to do with the onboard graphics, but I don't know enough about hardware to go further than that. Any ideas?
 
It means 'never mind', aka. "I was going to post here and realised after posting that the suggestions I had made were fairly moot, and this forum doesn't let users delete posts".
 
mikeymikec said:
It means 'never mind', aka. "I was going to post here and realised after posting that the suggestions I had made were fairly moot, and this forum doesn't let users delete posts".
Click to expand...
Okay, I thought that might be the case, I was thrown off as I assumed there would have been an "edited by" or something similar. Thanks anyway.
 
You've got a reasonable theory with the video, do you have a spare basic graphics card with which to test it?

Have any updates gone on for the graphics or X (or whatever system they're using these days)?

I'd be inclined to try Prime95 or its nearest equivalent, though it doesn't sound load-related to me.
 
I have the same motherboard and encountered the problem. I found what is given as a solution here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2094859

In case the URL is deleted: add "i915.i915_enable_rc6=0" to /etc/default/grub "GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT". Should look something like this then:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash i915.i915_enable_rc6=0"

Then run:
sudo update-grub

Reboot the system.

Hope that helps.
 
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