[TriLUG] Its broke and I gotta fix it

[M. Mueller (bhu5nji)]

It's too bad, but you'll have to get your hands dirty with some hardware.  
You'll need some known good parts to start with.

Work on a concrete surface that is touching terra-firma in sock or bare feet 
as you perform the following tasks.  Equalize your static potential by 
touching a copper H2O pipe often.  Strap on to it as you work if you are 
really careful. Don't walk around with parts in your hands when they are 
outside of the static bags.  ESD nightmare: wearing man-made soled shoes on 
wool carpet and dragging feet while carrying CPU by the pins.  I can just 
hear the transistors being blown up.

I recently heard about the "cardboard" test.  This is where you have a 
catasrophic failure and you need to test from the ground up.  You unplug 
everything from your mainboard and remove the mainboard to a piece of card 
board (an insulator).  You plug in the power cable, the monitor card, and 
keyboard, and monitor.  Then you turn on the power.  You are looking for 1) 
monitor function, 2) ability to get to the BIOS setup.

Then you try this same test with the mainboard installed in the box.

You are eliminating power and ground faults in this test and getting an 
initial sense of how you mainboard, CPU, CPU fan, and RAM are functioning.

No you start adding peripherals one at a time.

1) floppy boot
2) CDROM boot
3) HDD

I won't fill in all the details here.  There are cable orientation issues 
involved.  There are drive jumper issues. I worked for hours on an IDE cable 
and drive jumper mismatch.  I had the HDD jumpered for Master and I had the 
Secondary end of the cable plugged in to the drive.  Things kind-a didn't 
work...the worst kind of failure.

You'll be glad if you keep a HDD, FDD, and CDROM spare on the shelf.  You can 
buy them refurbished from www.driveguys.com or rip'em out of old machines.

If you choose to go this route, collect info and post questions as you go.  I 
am build three more machines in thenext 1.5 weeks, so I'm wearing my hardware 
hat again.

On the other hand, did the guy that built the machine for you give you a 
warranty?  I assume not since you are asking for help.

I'll post how and where to build a Linux box for $287 if you are interested.

Mike M.

On Friday 08 February 2002 06:21 am, you wrote:
> I gotta agree with these guys... sounds a lot like a HW issue.
>
> Do you by any chance have a surge protector (or even a UPS) on the machine?
> The power where I live is so bad that it eats up a computer in less than
> month if you try to run it wild and free off of CP&L.  The one second
> brown-outs followed by a sudden surge can lead to some real smoke and
> tears...
>
> Jon Carnes
> ===
>
> On Thursday 07 February 2002 23:18, Ben Pitzer wrote:
> > Well, I'd look at the IDE cable first to make sure that it's securely
> > attached at both ends.  If you pull it out, make sure that you put it
> > back in the same way as before.  If you have your CD and HDD on the same
> > IDE channel, try putting them on seperate channels (as in HDD on IDE1
> > and CD-ROM on IDE2).  See if your bios recognizes anything.  If that
> > fails, try replacing the IDE cable with a new one.  Lastly, I'd have
> > someone check out the drive for you in another machine.  The drive
> > itself may be hosed.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Ben Pitzer
>
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