[mythtv-users] Hard crashes of mythtv backends

[Michael T. Dean]

On 11/06/2007 12:30 PM, Norm Dugas wrote:
> Michael Rice wrote:
>   
>> On 11/5/07, Michael T. Dean <mtdean at thirdcontact.com> wrote:
>>     
>>> I was having similar issues with my master backend...  It was purely
>>> hardware--and I knew it from the start, ...
>>>
>>> Finally, I admitted that the chipset (from a "high-performance" chipset
>>> vendor) was garbage (second-generation is still too new to be reliable)
>>> and replaced the motherboard with one having a (low-performance) chipset
>>> that was identical to the one in my (rock-solid stable) slave backend.
>>> Best $50 I ever spent 
> I've been experiencing intermittent crashes for about 6 months on my
> FE/BE combo.
...
> Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe
>   

Hmmm.  nForce2-based MB.  Second generation nForce chipset.

Not that I'm saying anything about it--just thought that was
interesting.  :)

> One other thing I noticed about the time the lockups started is every
> now and then (maybe every 2 weeks), I get the following error in my
> messages file:
> Oct 22 14:33:18 pvrbox MCE: The hardware reports a non fatal,
> correctable incident occurred on CPU 0.
>   

Machine check exceptions are typically pretty serious hardware
failures--often heat related (or overstressing, i.e. from
overclocking).  Check out
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Check_Exception

Mike