[mythtv-users] OT: Hardware failure

[Brian Wood]

Eric Smith wrote:
> I have an old Athlon XP 2500 box that I use as one of my front ends that
> I've been having some heat issues with since I moved it into a new
> cabinet.  A couple of nights ago I decided to take it all apart, clean
> the fans, replace the thermal grease, etc to see if that would help at
> all.  After putting it all back together... the box refuses to boot.  It
> hangs at the uncompressing kernel line and with verbose on, at the line
> that says something like "Athlon Stepping 00" (sorry I don't have it in
> front of me and don't remember word for word).
> I took it all back apart, doubled checked all my work, put it back
> together and still no love.  Then I pulled an old hdd out of the closet
> with winxp on it and threw that in -- doesn't boot either.
> 
> Then I started checking hardware...
> The box has 2x512 sticks of ram... i booted with each stick
> individually... no love
> I took all the "extra" hardware out left just vid card, ram, cpu... no love
> I took the cpu out and stuck it in an even older mobo i have laying
> around.... the board only recognized the cpu at 1100mhz.... but it
> booted fine
> I put the cpu back on the original board, booted to memtest86 from the
> fedora dvd and ran it for 12 hours with 0 errors
> 
> So at this point, I'm thinking it must be mobo, although i figured that
> would have caused on error on memtest somewhere along the way?  Does
> anyone have any suggestions?

Well from what you say it's not the CPU, the HDD or the RAM, so the MoBo
is certainly a possibility.

So is everything else that has not been eliminated as the problem
though, things like the power supply.

Very often going into the case of a working machine results in "finger
drift", so check cables, card seating, motherboard not shorting to the
case etc.

Also check all the BIOS setup parameters on your mobo.

If you can boot and run memtest you can't have TOO much wrong, at least
you are getting though POST without errors.

BEWW