[mythtv-users] System melt down

Damian Surr damian at gingermagic.co.uk
Tue Jul 10 06:57:00 UTC 2007


John Drescher wrote:
>> All this is good advice, as was the "check for fsck ptompts" suggestion.
>>
>> There are just so many possibilities it is really not possible to
>> troubleshoot it over this list, much as we all would like to help.
>>
> After rereading the original post. I guess my advice does not directly
> apply to this situation as my advice was for debugging a machine that
> does not post. Sorry. As Brian mentioned this will be very difficult
> to solve over the list.
> 
> I will be willing to help a little but you have to explain very fully
> what is working and what you have tried. Please list what hardware you
> have. Does the machine boot with no soundcard installed? I know
> mythfrontend will run fine with no sound so this probably is not the
> reason for the initial problem.
> 
> 
> John

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.

Thanks again
Damian


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