How can I find the reason my PC crashes?
How can I find the reason my PC crashes?
Lately my PC has started crashing while it plays videos. It freezes completely, screen frozen and not responding to any input (keyboard, mouse), I mean I cannot change TTY (alt + ctrl + F(1-2-...)), and it cannot even respond to alt + PrntScr + REISUB. I have to force power off by holding down the power button.
After I reboot I have tried checking all logs available and I cannot find anything logged right before the incident. Last entries are always different and not indicating anything.
I suspect it has to do with the graphics card but I'm looking for ways that I can dig deeper on that and confirm it or not.
What else should I check? How can I find more info?
OS: Lubuntu 22.04.3 LTS (latest updates) I'm using the nvidia proprietary drivers (nvidia-driver-390)
UPDATE:
First of all thank you all for your input and fresh ideas. Now I've already tried some of them and I will continue with the other ones until I get some results.
till now I have tried
- memtest and it didn't show any errors.
- boot from a live distro and see if problem also occurs. Well it didn't occur but on the live distro you cannot change the graphics driver. So it was using the open source nouveau driver, also it didn't happen during the 1 hour I let it play. The thing is that it never was punctual even before. It could happen during the first hour or the third or sometime later.
Next steps are to
- open the case and clean it up to remove the possibility of high temp because of that,
- change my drivers to be the nouveau and try again,
- try with only the onboard GPU on,
- remove extra disks to reduce the load of the PSU
thank you all again.
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Check your storage connection! If storage disconnects, your OS will freeze and stop responding to the keyboard. Also, the os won't be able to write any logs because the storage isn't attached. Even power off won't work because the os can't read any files. This feels very similar to your problem.
For me, my motherboard had a faulty drive controller which would randomly stop working and drives would no longer appear connected.
I'm not sure whether you have the same issue as me but it has the same characteristics as mine. Hope this helps!
thanks for your input but it looks different. I mean when I power it off with the button, then it is possible to boot without issues. Also it doesn't freeze randomly. It freezes only if it plays videos. Now it is 10 days on uninterrupted since I stopped playing videos.
Had issue with my storage recently, and the symptom was similar to what OP described. Syslog didn't reveal anything, as the root filesystem was read only, so troubleshooting it was hard. Coincidentally I needed a newer kernel, and after the upgrade the problem disappeared.
What does storage have to do with the keyboard?
When storage disconnects while the os is still running, it causes the os to freeze and stop responding to all keyboard inputs. I thought this was similar to OPs issue which is why I suggested it
Not always. I've seen Linux systems keep running, and open programs work, until they need something from disk, and then either they throw an error or crash.
I was asking why, lol.