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.

  • @[email protected]English
    7•1 year ago

    If you have another pc, ssh from it to the problem machine and run sudo dmesg -w. That should show kernel messages as they are generated and won’t rely on them being written to disk.

    • @[email protected]OP
      6•1 year ago

      i will try it but I’m quite confident that it will be unresponsive/not reachable since if the kernel was listening it would respond to the alt + PrntScr + REISUB by unmounting the drives and I would see it when I examine the logs afterwards

      • @[email protected]English
        11•1 year ago

        To be clear, dmesg -w should be run before you do anything to cause the crash. It will continuously print kernel output until you press ctrl+c or the kernel crashes.

        In my experience, a crashing kernel will usually print something before going unresponsive but before it can flush the log to disk.

        • @[email protected]OP
          2•1 year ago

          from now on I’m having it open and shown on the screen show if it happens again I’ll see it. thanks