computer crashes everyday

[zarovich]

1.  I'm running slackware 10.2, and fluxbox
   Every day I wake up to my computer, and the mouse and keyboard do not respond.  The time says 4:42am

2.  It also crashes under windowsxp
  Windows brings up a blue screen about some hardware problem


My hardware is
80gb IDE HD (ntfs for windows xp)
160gb SATA HD
AMD 64 3400
1GB Corsair ram
Geforce 4 Ti 4200 video card
Soundblaster Audio card
Kingwin MutantX case (stock fans and PSU)

Any ideas on where to start?

[iago]

Tail your dmesg log on Slackware. 

tail -f /var/log/dmesg

And leave it on the screen.  That should display errors as they happen.  That might or might not give you more information.

<edit> another idea: leave it off at night

[Kp]

Check for cron jobs.  If it's that reliable about hanging at 4:42 am, I'd guess that you have some cron job running around then which causes a kernel panic.  Since Windows also fails, the cron job might just be tickling some hardware problem.

[zarovich]

my crontab had a job running at 4:40am every day... so I disabled that job, we shall see if this fixes it.

[MyndFyre]

What job, out of curiousity?

[iago]

4:40am is the default time for daily cron jobs. 

The following are on Slackware 10 by default:

logrotate  slocate

logrotate - rotates, compresses, and mails system logs
slocate - Security Enhanced version of the GNU Locate

I'm guessing that if it's one of those, it might be poking a harddrive problem. 

[Meh]

Best way to check it. Set the clock to 4:39 then watch.

[iago]

If it just freezes up, then there isn't really anything to watch. 

That's why I suggested tailing the dmesg log, since it displays errors as they happen. 

[rabbit]

Or set a chron job to restart at 4:39:59

[iago]

Or set a chron job to restart at 4:39:59

I think turning it off overnight is good, but that would probably work better.  The problem is that daily chron jobs always go at 4:40.  I guess you could just put it first.