Linux Is Breaking My PC?

[Xittenn]

I had issues a few months back with trying to get my PC to run Ubuntu. I had it to where it was installed and running but every now and again it crashed. It was particularly a problem when switching between Windows and Ubuntu and it got so bad a couple of times that my file system corrupted and data became maliciously viral in an undirected sort of way. I narrowed it down to my video card a Diamond HD5770 which is a pretty sweet card IMHO. In the end I upgraded my bios (which had disabled smart fan permanently until today,) upgraded my power supply (twice) and reinstalled everything a dozen times over. I found that if I used SpeedFan and kept my fan at 50% of jet engine (which is a nice sounding airplane hum) and just stuck to Windows all was well.

 

I guess the major problem I had with all that was the crashing had continued for a few days after several reinstalls and without my having installed Ubuntu again. All has been fine and it has been quite some time since this happened, like many months. So I tried to install Fedora today .... For starters my DVD burner wouldn't burn the damn disk, God only knows why, I never burn anything and I think this was my first try and it failed right around 99.9%. When I finally figured out why my Bios settings weren't picking up my boot off of USB, which took me just as long to figure out when I had installed Ubuntu, Fedora booted and there was no install to disk option Regardless I didn't click the automagik login and I was left suspended in limbo. Boot number two got me a little further but I crashed. Boot number three with minimal graphics got me to desktop but I crashed again. So I went back to Windows to look up some issues ..... lol not likely :/

 

Same thing as when I installed Ubuntu ..... crash, crash and more crash .... I think it might be related to my bios and SmartFan and Linux and my video card. I think Linux is turning off my video card fan and it is heating it up. But this is just a guess at best .... I couldn't roll back my bios when I upgraded it during the Ubuntu fiasco because Gateway sold the business and my model was no longer supported????????? Regardless does anyone know any better reasons why this might happen or where I can go to get some halp to fix it? I would really love to get the platform up so I could run Rosetta Commons, I mean I have my own projects but it is not functional for another two to three years and even when it will be it will still suck

 

Should I buy a new computer, or better yet an old one?

 

This is pretty hard to absorb being that even if I do get Fedora running I will still need to learn the complete gcc tool chain, Vim or other and there is still no guarantee that Rosetta Commons will even run on Core 14 with gcc 4.0 :/

Edited January 27, 2011 by Xittenn

[khaled]

 

Q1: do you use Linux with GNOME or KDE ..?

 

Q2: you installed Linux on a disk partition directly or you installed Linux inside windows ?

 

 

note: first you have to check if your BIOS disabled your hardware, or limiting some of them,

 

check BIOS for details and check the manual of your Cards, then when BIOS is validated,

 

move to Linux (recovery mode) and check for settings and everything else ...

 

Edited January 27, 2011 by khaled

[Xittenn]

Fedora Gnome off of a USB drive .....

 

I guess the upside to all of this is, despite the fact that I have just finally stabilized my machine after eight hours of fixing it to save me the trouble of spending eight hours reinstalling VC, WinSDK and DirectX .... SmartFan works again \o/ This is really weird because it was a problem a lot of users had on the bios upgrade that they couldn't roll back on ...

 

At any rate it was a LiveDisk run khaled, it never reached my HDD ... well not to be installed at any rate!

 

zZzzZz z . .

[Xittenn]

I unlocked the Administrator Account in Windows and logged in there. I created the USB LiveDisk which booted this time and there was a Install To Disk option on the desktop. It took some mucking about with my partitions but I now have Fedora and so far there hasn't been any crashing issues.

 

I wish the process for finding system erros was a little more defined. I never really know what happened, even after using utilities like WhoCrashed and sorting through various dump files .... All indicators still point to something with the video card but not to precisely what. It could be anything and my case is open and I see it is not the fan .... but now the case is open

[agentrnge]

With speedfan on my Asus board I am unable to control fan speeds unless Q-Fan was disabled in my bios ( Asus ). It would run either way and get temp and rpm polling data. So that might have nothing to do with your issue. I also realized that speedfan really doesn't do anything other than monitor and slow down fans. I installed it initially wanting to speed the fans up to keep things cooler. But it sounds like that is exactly what you were using it for to slow them down to 50%.

 

As for the linux install. I regularly need to either disable APIC power stuff in the bios, OR pass some options to the kernel boot loader thingy something like "boot noapic" at the installer prompt. Same kind of wierd boot up to random places and hang. I have seen this issue on almost every PC and almost every linux flavor.

 

Another issue I have with my HD4890 GPU is anytime Ubuntu does an update that happens to touch the kernel/gpu driver stuff, I loose my graphics drivers and the system hangs as soon as it fires up X windows. In this case, I have been able to reliably boot Ubuntu into recovery mode, root console with network access and re-install the ATI driver. Reboot, and all is well.

 

Within ubuntu you can use lm_sensors to check temperatures and fan rpms, ( but not change them ) AFAIK. The Software center installs it easy.

 

About the GPU fan, in XP, speedfan couldn't change mine, but the ATI driver package could, but not in linux. Either way linux is not stopping the fan. It sounds like its running around ~30-35% which is what I normally run it at. lm-sensors does not pick up my gpu temp :\

 

I hope linux is not killing your computer. Off topic maybe .. Depending on how much back and forth you do between windows and linux could a VM setup help you out at all?

I just tried Sun Virtual Box for the first time. Seems ok. As im sure you know VMs are not the way to go for everything, but they arent as bad as I always wanted to think they were. I need XP 32 bit to connect to my work VPN. A small VM for running XP for a simple desktop, email, web and putty does the job well.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

You should probably ask these problems on the support forums of your specific Linux distribution; they'll be able to help you track down the issues.

 

There's no good reason that a dual-boot setup with Windows and Linux should not work, so I suspect something else went on to corrupt your Windows filesystem.

[Xittenn]

 

I hope linux is not killing your computer. Off topic maybe .. Depending on how much back and forth you do between windows and linux could a VM setup help you out at all?

I just tried Sun Virtual Box for the first time. Seems ok. As im sure you know VMs are not the way to go for everything, but they arent as bad as I always wanted to think they were. I need XP 32 bit to connect to my work VPN. A small VM for running XP for a simple desktop, email, web and putty does the job well.

 

 

I'm actually hoping to port some work I'm doing on both Windows and Linux and am ready to give Linux side programming a go. Programming for Linux is probably best done on Linux though eventually I'll probably want to make the Linux port run on Cygwin or something just for fun when I get there. I'm thinking I will just get a second HDD.

 

I tried to install the Linux drivers for my card and that didn't go well so I will have to start again because I can't back in.

 

@Cap, I would assume as much but when things are all over the place they tend to either not respond or respond poorly and I am too emo for such situations I need a guru is what I need and the only one I know is well ........................... . . . .. .