[mythtv-users] System melt down

[Robin Gilks]

> Thanks everyone and sorry for my initial moaning vent of a post. I could
> just really do without this. Isn't that always the case though? Anyway ..
>
> In the past, I'd narrow down the problem the way that people have
> suggested. I used to live with a fellow geek and we'd just swap computer
> bits until we narrowed down the problem. Since then I've moved to quite
> a remote area so none of this is very easy any more. I have two
> notebooks in the house, but they're not exactly easy to swap bits out of
> for this purpose :-) And I have a Dell machine, but that really needs
> not to be messed with because of work. It's also very odd in there. I've
> built a fair few machines in my time and I attempted to test out the
> graphics card from the Myth box in the Dell last night. I couldn't even
> work out how to get the Dell card out and gave up as I'm really in
> trouble if I break anything on that one.
>
> Last night, through a process similar to what has been described
> (stripping the machine and putting things back bit by bit), I thought I
> narrowed down the problem to either the sound card (no problem, just
> replace) or the slot where the graphics card is on the motherboard
> (bigger problem :-))
>
> Then I booted and saw that there seemed to be some error with the hard
> drive too and that was more than I could take. Multiple things going
> wrong at the same time seemed bad.
>
> Now that I've got over my dispare, I'll try again and be more systematic
> about it all. I'll also tell you more about what Kubuntu is telling me
> about the hard drives. It didn't look too good to me, but maybe fine.
>
> Thanks for the support everyone. I know how hard it is to sort a broken
> system at the best of times (I stopped doing friends machines quite a
> while ago because it stopped being fun) so over a list it's pretty much
> impossible. I appreciate your moral support though and you'll all be
> much better at this than me anyway so if I give good information I'm
> sure I'll get things sorted so much quicker.
>

Things that flake out over a short time (as against just going bang) are
very often PSU related - thats where you would get random failures of
various parts.

I don't want to discourage but bad PSUs can lead to all the magic smoke
coming out of all the bits in your computer.

If you but can you get it up to the point where you install lm_sensors
then most motherboards have monitors you can read to check all the
volts...


-- 
Robin Gilks