Lately my PC has started crashing while it plays videos. It freezes completely, screen frozen and not responding to any input (keyboard, mouse), I mean I cannot change TTY (alt + ctrl + F(1-2-…)), and it cannot even respond to alt + PrntScr + REISUB. I have to force power off by holding down the power button.
After I reboot I have tried checking all logs available and I cannot find anything logged right before the incident. Last entries are always different and not indicating anything.
I suspect it has to do with the graphics card but I’m looking for ways that I can dig deeper on that and confirm it or not.
What else should I check? How can I find more info?
OS: Lubuntu 22.04.3 LTS (latest updates) I’m using the nvidia proprietary drivers (nvidia-driver-390)
UPDATE:
First of all thank you all for your input and fresh ideas. Now I’ve already tried some of them and I will continue with the other ones until I get some results.
till now I have tried
- memtest and it didn’t show any errors.
- boot from a live distro and see if problem also occurs. Well it didn’t occur but on the live distro you cannot change the graphics driver. So it was using the open source nouveau driver, also it didn’t happen during the 1 hour I let it play. The thing is that it never was punctual even before. It could happen during the first hour or the third or sometime later.
Next steps are to
- open the case and clean it up to remove the possibility of high temp because of that,
- change my drivers to be the nouveau and try again,
- try with only the onboard GPU on,
- remove extra disks to reduce the load of the PSU
thank you all again.
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Boot with a live CD from a different distro. This will split a hardware issue from a software issue.
This! Try this! Don’t go taking your computer apart until you try this. It’s great advice.
I was in a similar situation not too long ago and couldn’t find anything to fix it either at first. One thing that was high on my list was changing my PSU since a defect or weak one often seems to be a problem in such cases. Besides a general hardware failure of course. If it’s the hardware that could be anything really. Motherboard, RAM, GPU, PSU. PSU is the easiest to switch tho, so if you go that route I would try that first.
Anyways, I never had to do this cause in my case, believe it or not, a BIO update fixed my problem. I am still not 100% sure what happened but I think the update fixed the GPU voltage distribution or something similar.
Hope that help at least a little bit.
good idea about the PSU. I hadn’t thought of that. The PSU is not any high-performance/high-quality and is already 5 years old. Being unable to provide the required voltage may be a possibility if we accept that the performance degrades in time. (Was working without issues for 5 years in the same PC configuration).
I think I’ll try by first removing the extra HDDs so reducing the load and check again. Thanks for your input
If your processor/MB has onboard video, it would probably be easier to pull the gpu and test. If you still suspect power management, pulling other components like additional HDDs after adding the gpu back would confirm it.
Have you checked /var/log/syslog?
If not, see if there’s anything around the time of the crash there that indicates a GFX problem, like “GPU has fallen off the bus”.
yes. As I wrote
After I reboot I have tried checking all logs available and I cannot find anything logged right before the incident. Last entries are always different and not indicating anything.
Just to be certain, you have checked journalctl too?
isn’t this a unified way to present logs that also exist in var/log ? I mean if the logs are saved in var/log I’ve checked them. If there is a possibility that journalctl has more entries, then I need to check this too.
Seems you might know more than me. When I had an obscure crash related to my pc going into C-sleep state, I managed to find a pattern viewing the logs in reverse from the time of the crash.
