nizo's Journal: Well, here's a new one to add to the diagnostic pile

Problem: dell powerserver would boot and run ubuntu or redhat fine, but as soon as I started a gui up, the machine froze. If I just let the machine run without a gui it was fine, and Dell's diagnostics showed nothing.

Solution: reseating the video card. How it is possible this fixed the problem I don't know (or more accurately, how the machine even ran at all if a connection wasn't there is a miracle), but that would indeed appear to have been it.

Chip creep

[Talinom]

I've seen things like that before. Heating and cooling of the server will, over time, move the cards around. So will shipping.

The worst I saw was some PCs that had no ventilation and got really, really hot. Then were turned off for about 8 hours each day then turned back on. I'd have to reseat about three cards each week.

It sounds like you had just enough of the right pins in the slot for it to get enough power and get text on the screen. Pushing the thing to use graphics probably deprived it of power

I've seen this one too, and in other parts!

[Pancho Pistolas]

And I've seen it do things like trigger hard disk failures (albeit temporary ones that went away after reseating its respective cable connections), as well as muck with ISA or PCI modems.

My theory as to the cause of stuff like this is what I call a "floating ground" misconnection. I've noticed that these kinds of problems (i.e., the ones fixed by re-seating) tend to happen on plug-in components that have only ONE connection pin/contact that's defined as 'ground'. Usually, this pin or contact is also at th

Happens a lot

[BarryJacobsen]

The connection was there, it was probably just spotty. Running text mode it isn't pumping all that many pixels but when the GUI kicks in it's doing a lot more work. One of the computer labs I used to run had bad thermal scoot problems with the video cards - you could always tell that was the issue because Windows XP would start to boot and show the progress bar, but after a few seconds there would be animated random noise where the progress bar used to be (though it still said "Windows XP" up at the top j

It's no miracle

[plover]

Depends on the card, but I'd wager (only a tiny amount) that you are using either AGP or PCI, and not PCI Express. Both PCI Express and AGP card edge adapters have staggered pads to increase their connection density. An improperly seated card that is slightly tilted can short together just a few of the upper and lower pads near the end of the connector -- enough that it stays working, as long as those lines aren't actively used for signaling. And PCI slots aren't always perfect either, but I've found th