# Hardware error? No human readable MCE decoding support...

## joefish

When I got up this morning my computer had locked up. Rebooting gets me this. (Sorry photo is not the best.)

Booting off an older install on a different hard drive *seems* to work fine. I thought then that really it is just a software problem.

However booting off the live CD gives me the same message, albeit later on in the boot process, as opposed to right at the start.

If it's a hardware error, then why does an older install boot? Is it something to do with the older kernel (2.6.31, I think) not checking something? They both have exactly the same kernel config. New kernel is 2.6.34.

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## krinn

```
CONFIG_X86_MCE=y

CONFIG_X86_MCE_INTEL=y

# CONFIG_X86_MCE_AMD is not set

# CONFIG_X86_ANCIENT_MCE is not set

```

Only kernel compile to check mce status will, then you know, check mce status.

emerge mcelog and see what you could get from it

As you see mce is for cpu, not really a good news sorry

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## joefish

OK what's weird: Using the live CD, if I boot without the hard drive in that I was using (and use my secondary drive instead), then the boot process completes fine! I only get that message when the main drive is plugged in.

Could a hard drive fault somehow cause this error to occur? That seems odd...

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## joefish

Can that last message. Having booted from the live CD, even without primary hard drive in, I get that same error message after a few minutes.

My next question is then, is this guaranteed to be a CPU problem? If I replaced the CPU, would this go away? Or could it be a motherboard problem?

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## Etal

According to Wikipedia, it could be a lot of things:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Check_Exception

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