[Techtalk] Diagnosing a hardware problem

[Vera Childs]

On 11/15/2002 at 9:47 AM Helen Rosseau wrote:
>I think changing the RAM first with known good RAM would be an
>easy 
>test and save a lot of headaches later.

Thanks, Helen. I'll be giving that a try today.

Here's what I did so far....

I tried each chip by itself. The memtest86 takes so long to actually get
the errors, that I'll have to wait until I'm about to leave work before I
start that on each one by themselves. But in the meantime, I tried booting
my regular Mandrake installation disk. With both chips in their by
themselves, it still hung at the same place. Here's the last part of the
output where it hangs:

-----
Uniform MultiPlatform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00alpha2
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
VP_IDE: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 39
VP_IDE: chipset revisi
-----

That's where it stops (in the middle of "revision"). So I tried playing
with some options that I got from a google search. Adding "vga=normal" to
the kernel options gets me a few lines farther:

-----
Uniform MultiPlatform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00alpha2
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
VP_IDE: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 39
VP_IDE: chipset revisision 16
VP_IDE: not 100% native mode: will probe IRQs later
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
VP_IDE: VIA vt82c596b (rev 23) IDE UDMA66 controller on pci 00:07.1
    ide0: BM-DMA at 0xe000-0xe007, BIOS settings: hda: DMA, hdb: DMA
    ide1: BM-DMA at 0xe008-0xe00f, BIOS settings: hdc: DMA, hdd: pio
-----

Then it hangs. So then I tried adding "noprobe" and "apm=off". It booted
this time! But then I got to the point where I was selecting the partition
to install from, and it hung. Rebooted a few times with these same options,
and sometimes it will hang at the normal place (the screen output just
above this paragraph), and once it booted again and let me get past
choosing the partition, but as I started to type the directory name to
install from, it spontaneously rebooted!

I think my computer is possessed. :)

Later today, I'll steal, I mean... borrow <g>, my officemate's memory and
see if I get the same results with that. I'm starting to suspect
something's up with the motherboard, although I'm not real good at
diagnosing hardware problems like that.


-Vera