# My machine keeps on powering off intermittently!

## rapichai

I recently bought a Gateway 600XL laptop.

It has a Intel Pentium 4 M 2.6GHz cpu, 1024MB Ram, Intel 845MP chipset, and a ATI Radeon Mobility 9000 64 MB video card.

I have succesfully installed Gentoo linux 1.4_rc4 on it. Everything works great so far, except my machine will power off intermittently.

Initially I thought it might be a problem with ACPI or APM, so I compiled a kernel without them. This did not solve the problem.

After looking through /var/log/* for oops messages, I didn't find anything

that looked like it was causing this behaviour.

I originally installed the 'gentoo-sources' kernel on the machine, so i thought I might try the "stable" 'gs-sources' kernel to see if the problem lied in the gentoo-sources kernel. This also did not solve the problem.

Has anyone experienced this type of behaviour before?

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

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## drjimmy42

Have you tried it with any other OS successfully?  Are you sure its not a hardware problem with poor battery charge or something?  Maybe try compiling apm back in (or as a module so you don't have to keep compiling) and check the battery state.

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## rapichai

 *Quote:*   

> Have you tried it with any other OS successfully? Are you sure its not a hardware problem with poor battery charge or something? Maybe try compiling apm back in (or as a module so you don't have to keep compiling) and check the battery state.

 

All of these poweroffs occured while the machine was plugged into an A/C power source (with fully charged battery in it also).

Well, it shipped with Windows XP.

XP is actually very stable, no problems, all hardware works.

Gentoo: best linux distribution, in my opinion, but unfortunately I am experiencing intermittent power offs and cannot correctly diagnose the problem. I have tried many variations of the linux kernels made available by portage system.

FreeBSD: I tried to boot and install 5.1 RELEASE from floppies, but it could not boot.

Next, I downloaded ISO of 4.8 - STABLE and installed successfully.  It is still a fresh (roughly 6 hours) install, but I haven't experienced any mysterious power offs yet. 

I am still interested in finding out what actually causes such inappropiate behavior, so if anyone has any ideas, please respond.  Is anyone else running gentoo on a Pentium 4 M with Intel 845MP chipset?

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## mickwd

Is it an overheating problem ?

Continuous compiling a length of time will put a heavy load on a machine (on processor, memory and disk), and may cause a laptop to get so hot it shuts off to prevent hardware damage.

This would be more likely on AC power than on batteries, as the laptop would tend to run in a lower-power (i.e. cooler) mode to help prolong the battery life.

See if you can get any temperate measuring programs (e.g. lm-sensors) installed.

If it is an overheating problem, one thing to check is that the laptop vents are free (it can be easy to block them by using a laptop on a soft surface).

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## Jimboberella

Doubtfull that overheating would be the problem as the P4 will just slow down till the temp drops.

It is probably still an ACPI issue. Try explicitly turning off ACPI in the bios and/or on the grub/lilo kernel command line.

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## rapichai

Is there still ACPI code in the

kernel even if you configure it 

without ACPI or APM support? 

I've already tried compiling kernels

without support for either.

I don't think it is a problem with

overheating because, the machine

made it through the complete installation

process (lots of compiling there).

At first I thought it might be

XF86 radeon drivers causing the

problem due to coincidental occurances

of 'radeon_unlock' messages in

/var/log/kern.log as the last message

before machine shut off. However it

has also happened when X was not running (no radeon message).

I am running FreeBSD 4.8 now and have

had no problems with machine shutting off so far.

It is a shame that I could not get

gentoo to be stable on my laptop. I was

really looking forward to having vmware

and win4lin. Since the machine just

shuts off (no panic), nothing useful

gets logged.

I have not tried any other linux distros,

so I am unsure if this is a problem

with kernel or gentoo.

Well.... I am still stumped.

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## rapichai

[identical to previous message].Last edited by rapichai on Fri Aug 29, 2003 4:27 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## RangerDude

Listen to this.

My old notebook couldn't work with mandre 8.2. It kept going into sleep mode! That was damn annoying, it would happen in the middle of typing. It wasen't a timeout, but just random sleeps about every 2-5min.

The funny thing, was that it only happened when the network was connected.

No traces of anything in any log. I never solved it as I went to debian where the problem wasen't there.

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## kronon

That is damn anoing. Any way, I also think it's something with acpi /power management. Have you disabled every thing at powermanagement? Are you sure you are using the kernel you think you are. Or maybe you compiled some of the powermanagement modules and that the kernel automodprobed those.

How far do you get when starting gentoo? beyond kernel?

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## rapichai

 :Evil or Very Mad:   :Mad:   Yes it is unbelievably annoying as you can already imagine.

I am sure that I configured the various (gentoo-sources and gs-sources) kernels without ACPI or APM support. I also confirmed that no modules were loaded (lsmod).

The system ran fine.... everything  (X11, dvd playback, etc) worked fine except for that one annoying thing.... intermittent power offs!!!  :Mad: 

I was thinking of trying to install the redhat-sources kernel, but..... my machine shutoff   :Shocked: 

At that point, I installed FreeBSD 4.8.

Thus far, everything is working equally as well as Gentoo... except DVD playback.

I am using Ogle, and it was better on Gentoo/Linux (except when my machine died).

It is slightly laggy at times on FreeBSD.

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## vhkristof

Had, the same problem ...

I fixed it with:

```
echo -n 1 /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/throttling
```

(or something like that, I am not working in Gentoo right now).

This would make your laptop work at 88% of its capabilities.

I always do this when I am compiling for longer times, cauz this

prevents overheating.

Try it ...

Greetz

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## mickwd

 *Quote:*   

> Doubtfull that overheating would be the problem as the P4 will just slow down till the temp drops. 

 

But what's going to make the P4 slow down if ACPI isn't working properly ?

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