On a sunny day (Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:43:42 GMT) it happened Jan Panteltje wrote in :
So, what happened.... The first sign that something was wrong, was when I looked in the temperature log in the morning, it displays the outside and inside temperatures, logs every 10 minutes IIRC, and found one entry with -87 C for the inside temp... Could it be a bit error? RAM? bad? sensor? USB? Just left things running. The second sign something was wrong was the next day when the screen froze, Linux X windows, no mouse, no keyboard, had to power down... OK, could have been the USB hub cable, left it on. The third sign something was wrong was when I programmed 'spiderman2' to record from satellite, and the program marked the recording as 100 % successful, but there was nothing on disk, no file, no error messages, nothing. As I wrote xdipo the recording software, I know this can only happen if code sections are jumped or something like that. So now I was sure it as the PC, and started testing if all connectors were put in correctly (12 o'clock at night). The cable to the sat dish (SMA) was not fixed tight, so I turned it, the PC crashed.... Opened it, moved that PCI sat card a bit in the slot, tried again, I could make it crash that way, touched a memory module, all of the sudden: DMA error on hda, system dead. Reboot, BIOS checksum error, insert system floppy disk.... Well, that 'floppy'... had not used a floppy in years.... System disk? It is a (very good, and expensive) Tyan motherboard. Took an other PC (no floppy drive in that either) and went to the Tyan site, could not find anything related to this motherboard their, except 'to be done' or something. Used google. Google found the BIOS flash files on the Tyan site, but it said: Insert your win 95 (!) or win 98 boot floppy, and run the flash75 utility blah blah... Anyways, I found an old win98 floppy, but how to get that flash utility and BIOS image on it??? No way I could write to that floppy without running OS, a link to internet, or a link to an other PC. So tried old dos filelink (via serial port) but for some reason I could not write to that floppy.
So this morning I went and bought one of those USB floppy drives, very neat thing, 25 Euro
formatting link
You can just plug those in the USB of the laptop and can mount it as mass storage device in Linux. So wrote the BIOS image and flash utility on an old floppy, and tried again to flash the BIOS as indicated on the Tyan site... Error, error, error, error, pretty sure I got all those command line switches right... When I bough that floppy thing I told the salesperson 'I am going to try to flash the BIOS, if it fails I will be back for a new PC... They, norrod, have some nice small ones for 254 Euro now, dual core, cheap, had one ready... So, anyways was about to put on my jacket to go and throw away some money, when I thought: One last thing, I noticed that when I just started that flash program without all those command line switches that Tyan said you needed, it asked for a BIOS image. So I just entered that BIOS image name, and Ah! it flashed the BIOS. Booted from DVD with Linux grub, Linux started, the backup (I was wise enough to make a backup of the whole system on the other drive) also started.. CMOS checksum error, accept default, set CMOS in BIOS setup.. OK. But on disk 1 (hda) is an old win 98 and win XP, both are dead, both hang somewhere in boot. So hda is messed up, but come to think of it, I only use win98 for the Canon scanner, and I have
*never* found any use for win Xp, so win 98 I can probably re-install after I reformat and repartition hda, I dunno if Xp will let me register it again.... But that was a waste of money anyways,,,
So server is up, Linux rules, online, it was, in the end, just dirty connectors, took the whole box apart, cleaned all connectors, humidity, in front of open window, could have been it. And, now I have a nice USB floppy drive I will likely never use again.. hda win 98 (dead) win Xp (dead) hdb Linux backup hdc DVD burner hdd Linux flop ??
So, do not touch memory modules when power is on... :-)