Spurious Reboot

john.morris · 12-11-2005, 08:19 PM

I've found my newly installed linux machine at the login prompt a couple of times, and then one day noticed the computer rebooting, when it was at the desktop. This made 3 times in 3 days...

How can I tell, after the fact, what may have caused the reboot?

Regards,

John

jailbait · 12-11-2005, 11:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by john.morris

I've found my newly installed linux machine at the login prompt a couple of times, and then one day noticed the computer rebooting, when it was at the desktop. This made 3 times in 3 days...

How can I tell, after the fact, what may have caused the reboot?

One thing that you can do to narrow down the possibilities is check to see if fsck was run during the boot. If fsck was run then the shutdown did not include umounting the partitions. If fsck was run then the problem was probably hardware. If fsck was not run then the problem was probably a software error which resulted in an orderly shutdown. You check to see if fsck was run during boot with:

dmesg | grep fsck | less

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Steve Stites

ahedler · 12-12-2005, 01:01 PM

I'd start checking the /var/log/messages file for messages prior to the reboots. Most hardware/software failures should show up there. One exception might be if there was a power hit. Are you using a UPS? Does it have logging? If you are not using a UPS, even a minor spike or dropout could cause spurious reboots with no record in the messages log file.