[GTALUG] paid help to install Ubuntu 14.04 server on old workstation?

[Alex Volkov]

I think it's okay to diagnose the problem on the list, I'm interested in
weird and esoteric failures

I second what Kevin is saying.

You are probably experiencing some sort of hardware failure in either power
supply or motherboard that could have been triggered by switching the
computer on and off a few times.

You can open power supply case and visually examine for any burn marks or
defective capacitors.
Try unplugging raid controller and see if the system loads bios.
If that doesn't help try several combinations of memory modules -- the
system probably doesn't have ECC memory and that might be causing problems.

If that doesn't work, It might not be worthwhile diagnose the error,
because you will need:
(1) a working power supply to verify that power supply is at fault
(2) a working motherboard -- and plugging it it might be a bit of a chore.

You can also try going to canadacomputers do diagnostics but they could be
expensive.

It's probably much more time efficient to get new cpu/memory/motherboard
combo along with new power supply and transplant it into an old case.

Alex.

On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 11:12 AM, Joe Murray <joe.murray at jmaconsulting.biz>
wrote:

> I have an old workstation with an Asus P5Q motherboard, Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz
> and 6 500Gb drives. I've only done a few Ubuntu installs, and I'm having
> trouble getting past a problem with installing on a RAID device - my guess
> is that it was a problem with master boot record or something. Not sure if
> I have done something quite bad, but for some reason it no longer even
> shows BIOS stuff (yes, I've checked the cabling), and the power source
> doesn't sound quite normal for a few seconds after power on. Please contact
> me (offlist if that is netiquette here) with suggestions of who could help
> me with this fairly simple hardware/sysadmin task, either yourself or an
> organisation or person.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Joe Murray, PhD
> President, JMA Consulting
> joe.murray at jmaconsulting.biz
> skype JosephPMurray twitter JoeMurray
> 416.466.1281
>
>
>
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