Experiencing random system CRASHES? Potential fix here

General Discussion
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I had problems with Qubes randomly rebooting on me pretty much the whole time I’ve been using Qubes. Most of the time it would happen while doing updates, but not always. I chalked it down to either bad hardware or bad hardware compatibility, but I have found a fix. I went into my BIOS and noticed there are three basic “templates” for BIOS settings:

  • Bio mode
  • Normal mode
  • OC Genie II mode (hardcore stuff, XMP, overclocking, etc)

I changed it from Normal to Bio and now no more crashes. I figured someone might find this helpful in the future, although you may need to adapt the method to your specific BIOS (in my case it’s a 10 year old MSI board)

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How long is your test duration so far? I have had a few days without system freezes without me doing any modification on my OS/BIOS. I was thinking that days of random complete system freezes were behind me… until today–I had two system freezes on me out of the blue.

3

Sounds like your system was overheating and in that mode it’s not doing that anymore.
Monitor your CPU temperatures when it’s under load.

Qubes OS puts a lot of systems under stress that aren’t used to it under regular OSes like Linux or Windows.

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P.S.:
Most CPUs switch off at ~100 Celsius.

If you experience that, check your hardware manuals how to clean or replace your CPU fan and CPU thermal paste.

5

Pretty much been on the whole time since I posted that, no crash yet :smiley:

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Yep… I tried the OC Genie II mode just for kicks (I’d never even knew what it was so I figured maybe it’ll make it faster and not crash) and I couldn’t even boot. Every time I tried, it would get a little less further in the boot process. It couldn’t even stay on long enough to go back to the BIOS to change it back. But then I let it cool down for a couple hours and when I came back I was able to enter the BIOS and set everything back to bio mode. So yeah it’s gotta be a heat problem lol. I’ll see about replacing that 10 year old thermal paste :I