My home Linux box is acting decidedly weird. This time, when it froze up and wouldn’t reboot I opened the side to clean out some dust. I noticed two strange things:
- One of the case fans wouldn’t spin when I pushed it, like all the others
- Even after I removed that fan, when I booted the CPU fans would spin for a second or two and then stop.
I left it to cool for a few minutes, and now it’s booting. But that business about the fans spinning and then stopping is worrying me. Could it be overheating, or a sign that this motherboard is nearly dead? I was bzip2-ing a large file when it happened, and the hard drives were making ugly noises.
ISTM the MB automagically starts the fans spinning at boot, and later on, the firmware takes over control. I say this because I’ve seen lots of bad MB’s do just that: spin at powerup but not boot, and then the fans stop.