Netbook Randomly Shutting Off

[Zaune]

It's happened four times in the last two hours now. I'm not doing anything particularly resource-intensive, just reading (or in the last instance editing) a TV Tropes page when pow! Screen goes blank and the machine turns itself off. Boots back up like nothing happened each time. It's an EeePC 901 running Lubuntu, if that helps; the 4GB drive with the OS on is almost full, if that tells you anything.

[Mr Bean]

It's happened four times in the last two hours now. I'm not doing anything particularly resource-intensive, just reading (or in the last instance editing) a TV Tropes page when pow! Screen goes blank and the machine turns itself off. Boots back up like nothing happened each time. It's an EeePC 901 running Lubuntu, if that helps; the 4GB drive with the OS on is almost full, if that tells you anything.

That does tell me a few things, but I have a few questions.


1. Is the netbook on battery power or plugged in during these shutdowns
2. Can you force it to happen? IE open ten programs at once and bam restart?
3. ...How fill is that hard drive? And can you offload anything if you have less than 300 megs free. Hell a 5$ 8 gig usb drive would triple your storage space if it has a usb slot.
4. You do know if there is anything hardware wrong buying a new one will be almost identical to fixing this one right?

[TronPaul]

Are you using it on a bed or other clothed surface? Many laptops will reboot if they overheat. Make sure the laptop is on a flat hard surface. If you need to use it in bed or on a soft surface put it on a textbook or another hardback book.

If you're running Linux you'll have access to some pretty detailed logs. I'd suggest looking at some of the logs listed here around the time when the restart occurred. If you need help looking through them feel free to post them to pastebin and link them so we can look over them.

[Zaune]

1. Is the netbook on battery power or plugged in during these shutdowns
2. Can you force it to happen? IE open ten programs at once and bam restart?
3. ...How fill is that hard drive? And can you offload anything if you have less than 300 megs free. Hell a 5$ 8 gig usb drive would triple your storage space if it has a usb slot.
4. You do know if there is anything hardware wrong buying a new one will be almost identical to fixing this one right?

1. Plugged in.
2. I can try; I'll get back to you on that as soon as I get my backups fully up to date.
3. Just over 20MB left, and everything it's possible to offload to the second SSD has been aside from a handful of writing projects and classroom assignments that would collectively fit on a floppy.
4. Yes, but it had bloody well better not be hardware-related; I only just bought this thing!

Are you using it on a bed or other clothed surface? Many laptops will reboot if they overheat. Make sure the laptop is on a flat hard surface. If you need to use it in bed or on a soft surface put it on a textbook or another hardback book.

If you're running Linux you'll have access to some pretty detailed logs. I'd suggest looking at some of the logs listed here around the time when the restart occurred. If you need help looking through them feel free to post them to pastebin and link them so we can look over them.

Desk, though thanks to the quite staggering amount of clutter that mine has acquired it's resting at an angle. I already thought of overheating, though; I've got a temperature monitoring widget on the desktop and it's never gone over 570c.

And much trawling through the kernel log netted me this:

[several hundred nearly identical variants of the same message]
Feb 20 05:04:51 jake-901 kernel: [ 389.411769] phy0 -> rt2x00pci_regbusy_read: Error - Indirect register access failed: offset=0x0000101c, value=0xffffffff
Feb 20 05:04:51 jake-901 kernel: [ 389.568194] phy0 -> rt2x00queue_write_tx_frame: Error - Dropping frame due to full tx queue 0.
Feb 20 05:04:51 jake-901 kernel: [ 389.738325] phy0 -> rt2x00pci_regbusy_read: Error - Indirect register access failed: offset=0x0000101c, value=0xffffffff
[about twenty more nearly identical variants of the same message]
Feb 20 05:04:58 jake-901 kernel: [ 396.383490] PM: Marking nosave pages: 000000000009f000 - 0000000000100000

I'm not sure if that's directly relevant because I can't recall the exact time the crash happened, but it looks somewhat worrying.

[TronPaul]

Found an old bug report that may be related here, but it appears that those messages are not causing the resets. This seems to occur with suspend and that wireless card. Linked to the bug report was a forum thread with a work around, but I don't think it will solve your random poweroff problem. I'd be worried about only having 20MB free. Try doing an

Code: Select all

apt-get autoremove

and see if that frees up space. Otherwise I'd try and analyze what's using so much space and if you can reduce it.

[Zaune]

Running autoremove and getting rid of Kompozer has brought the 4GB drive back up to 50MB free. That's within acceptable limits for now seeing as I have an 8GB drive and an SD card to store anything bigger than a .txt file.

Can't seem to reproduce those random shutdowns though. Maybe it was a script on the page I was viewing?

[Zaune]

Just happened again. Here's the last sixty seconds of entries from the system log before it went kaput:

Code: Select all

Feb 20 22:42:04 jake-901 kernel: [ 5457.265975] kbd_keycode: 36 callbacks suppressed
Feb 20 22:42:04 jake-901 kernel: [ 5457.265993] keyboard: can't emulate rawmode for keycode 240
Feb 20 22:42:04 jake-901 kernel: [ 5457.266052] keyboard: can't emulate rawmode for keycode 240
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.120528] wlan0: deauthenticated from ac:e8:7b:4d:7e:23 (Reason: 7)
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 wpa_supplicant[922]: CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED bssid=ac:e8:7b:4d:7e:23 reason=7
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.220574] cfg80211: All devices are disconnected, going to restore regulatory settings
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.220602] cfg80211: Restoring regulatory settings
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.220625] cfg80211: Calling CRDA to update world regulatory domain
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 NetworkManager[762]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: completed -> disconnected
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247443] cfg80211: Updating information on frequency 2412 MHz for a 20 MHz width channel with regulatory rule:
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247459] cfg80211: 2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247469] cfg80211: Updating information on frequency 2417 MHz for a 20 MHz width channel with regulatory rule:
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247481] cfg80211: 2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247490] cfg80211: Updating information on frequency 2422 MHz for a 20 MHz width channel with regulatory rule:
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247501] cfg80211: 2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247511] cfg80211: Updating information on frequency 2427 MHz for a 20 MHz width channel with regulatory rule:
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247523] cfg80211: 2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247532] cfg80211: Updating information on frequency 2432 MHz for a 20 MHz width channel with regulatory rule:
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247543] cfg80211: 2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247553] cfg80211: Updating information on frequency 2437 MHz for a 20 MHz width channel with regulatory rule:
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247564] cfg80211: 2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247574] cfg80211: Updating information on frequency 2442 MHz for a 20 MHz width channel with regulatory rule:
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247584] cfg80211: 2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247594] cfg80211: Updating information on frequency 2447 MHz for a 20 MHz width channel with regulatory rule:
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247605] cfg80211: 2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247614] cfg80211: Updating information on frequency 2452 MHz for a 20 MHz width channel with regulatory rule:
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247625] cfg80211: 2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247634] cfg80211: Updating information on frequency 2457 MHz for a 20 MHz width channel with regulatory rule:
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247644] cfg80211: 2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247654] cfg80211: Updating information on frequency 2462 MHz for a 20 MHz width channel with regulatory rule:
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247665] cfg80211: 2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247674] cfg80211: Updating information on frequency 2467 MHz for a 20 MHz width channel with regulatory rule:
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247685] cfg80211: 2457000 KHz - 2482000 KHz @ 20000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247694] cfg80211: Updating information on frequency 2472 MHz for a 20 MHz width channel with regulatory rule:
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247705] cfg80211: 2457000 KHz - 2482000 KHz @ 20000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247714] cfg80211: Updating information on frequency 2484 MHz for a 20 MHz width channel with regulatory rule:
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247725] cfg80211: 2474000 KHz - 2494000 KHz @ 20000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247737] cfg80211: World regulatory domain updated:
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247744] cfg80211:     (start_freq - end_freq @ bandwidth), (max_antenna_gain, max_eirp)
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247754] cfg80211:     (2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247765] cfg80211:     (2457000 KHz - 2482000 KHz @ 20000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247775] cfg80211:     (2474000 KHz - 2494000 KHz @ 20000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247786] cfg80211:     (5170000 KHz - 5250000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 kernel: [ 5519.247796] cfg80211:     (5735000 KHz - 5835000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
Feb 20 22:43:06 jake-901 NetworkManager[762]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: disconnected -> scanning
Feb 20 22:43:08 jake-901 wpa_supplicant[922]: Trying to authenticate with ac:e8:7b:4d:7e:23 (SSID='BTHub3-3X3T' freq=2462 MHz)
Feb 20 22:43:08 jake-901 NetworkManager[762]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: scanning -> authenticating
Feb 20 22:43:08 jake-901 kernel: [ 5520.448368] wlan0: authenticate with ac:e8:7b:4d:7e:23 (try 1)
Feb 20 22:43:08 jake-901 kernel: [ 5520.449941] wlan0: authenticated
Feb 20 22:43:08 jake-901 wpa_supplicant[922]: Trying to associate with ac:e8:7b:4d:7e:23 (SSID='BTHub3-3X3T' freq=2462 MHz)
Feb 20 22:43:08 jake-901 kernel: [ 5520.455987] wlan0: associate with ac:e8:7b:4d:7e:23 (try 1)
Feb 20 22:43:08 jake-901 NetworkManager[762]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: authenticating -> associating
Feb 20 22:43:08 jake-901 kernel: [ 5520.464431] wlan0: RX ReassocResp from ac:e8:7b:4d:7e:23 (capab=0x411 status=0 aid=2)
Feb 20 22:43:08 jake-901 kernel: [ 5520.464443] wlan0: associated
Feb 20 22:43:08 jake-901 wpa_supplicant[922]: Associated with ac:e8:7b:4d:7e:23
Feb 20 22:43:08 jake-901 NetworkManager[762]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: associating -> associated
Feb 20 22:43:08 jake-901 NetworkManager[762]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: associated -> 4-way handshake
Feb 20 22:43:08 jake-901 wpa_supplicant[922]: WPA: Key negotiation completed with ac:e8:7b:4d:7e:23 [PTK=CCMP GTK=TKIP]
Feb 20 22:43:08 jake-901 wpa_supplicant[922]: CTRL-EVENT-CONNECTED - Connection to ac:e8:7b:4d:7e:23 completed (reauth) [id=0 id_str=]
Feb 20 22:43:08 jake-901 NetworkManager[762]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: 4-way handshake -> completed
Feb 20 22:43:16 jake-901 kernel: [ 5529.337175] keyboard: can't emulate rawmode for keycode 240
Feb 20 22:43:16 jake-901 kernel: [ 5529.337220] keyboard: can't emulate rawmode for keycode 240

And there's something odd about the timestamps, too; the last log entry is at 22:43, but the actual cut-out happened at 22:51.

[Terralthra]

Almost everything there is related to your wifi. The keyboard line about "can't emulate rawmode for keycode 240" is referencing your media-keyboard "wifi on/off" button.

[Zaune]

Doesn't surprise me; the signal at this end of the house has always been spotty.

But speaking of the keyboard, one common thread I've noticed is that the cut-offs always seem to happen when I hit the down arrow repeatedly. I also saw the battery light blink off for a second as well after the last one; I think I've got a loose connection somewhere.

[Zaune]

Update: It appears to only be happening when the laptop is running on AC power. I'm leaning towards a faulty power brick as the cause.

[Zaune]

Update: It appears to only be happening when the laptop is running on AC power. I'm leaning towards a faulty power brick as the cause.