Hi all,

Recently, my laptop has begun to randomly shut down and turn off all indicator lights (battery, etc). When this happens, the laptop feels very hot, above the hard drive. Can anyone suggest a way to troubleshoot this?

It is a Compal Hel81, about 2 years old. As far as I know, the heat sensors don´t work in Linux.

Thanks,
richie

I think the first step in trouble shooting this heat issue is to ask yourself how important your data is and back it up if you haven't already. Because hard drives do fail.

Done. Now, how to fix the problem.. Is there an error log or something I can look at that explains why the computer is shutting down?

It does seem that it is the harddrive and it is about that time, but it would be nice if there was a way to verify this without having to swap it with a new one or wait for it to crash, thereby rendering my laptop useless.

Trouble is, laptops are generally so compact that it could probably be something else in the same area getting hot.

However, assuming that the hard disk is a probable candidate, you could try loading and configuring the 'SMART' set of hard disk diagnostic tools; at least you should be able to get a hard disk temperature off that and you might get other worthwhile info too.

AFAIK, the real problem with the sensors is that there is no real standard for the correlation between the electrical connection and where the sensor is placed. That is, one manufacturer might decide that 'Sensor 1' is always close to the CPU another might decide that 'Sensor 1' is always on the motherboard, close to the air outlet, and there might be different scalings involved, too.

So, you can get readings, but it won't necessarily be very meaningful to you unless someone else with the same kit has configured the the set up.

/var/log/messages may tell you why it shut down.
Open that file, and scroll through it until you find the date & time of the last unexpected shutdown. Then read carefully.