fans suddenly went to low speed - software issue?
 

I have a Zareason 4330 laptop, new, running Scientific Linux 6.

It was working great until a few days ago. Now the fans are stuck at the lowest (barely turning) speed -- I run a lot of CPU-intense programs and it lead to the computer overheating & shutting down.

I have tried using sensors-detect and "sensors" but all I get are the CPU temps, no fan controls. Nothing under /proc/acpi is related to fans.

I've been trying to get my motherboard info to maybe do a better job with sensors-detect, but all I can find out is that the manufacturer is "Compal" -- nothing else is listed.

Please help me get back to work, as this is a disaster if I can't run these programs...!

I have been fighting (loosing, actually) that battle on a Toshiba laptop forever. From my research, there is a compatibility issue in the implementation of ACPI in the system BIOS, which actually gets used to control the fan (surprised me). The only way I could get the fans running was to let it overheat and shutdown. Quickly rebooting, I could wait just long enough in the bootloader for the BIOS to crank up the fans, and then boot Linux. The fans would stay running at whatever speed they were at when Linux loaded. Tried a few different distros, but to no avail. Is your BIOS made by something like "Insyde H20"? If so, that's where the problem is.
--- rod

Yes, it is Insyde BIOS, and it sucks. I don't think I've seen a more low-feature BIOS before. Now I realize that zareason makes cheap crap. :(

The weird thing is that it DID work for a while with the fans going up & down as they should with the load... I am emailing their support to try to find out why that is.

PS I was using Scientific Linux, you could give that a try.