[GTALUG] Unbootability

Peter King peter.king at utoronto.ca
Thu Oct 23 14:20:17 UTC 2014


Thanks for all the suggestions.  Here's what I've found out so far.

First, the computer simply won't boot with only RAM/videocard/CDR drive;
it keeps saying there is a bootdisk error (presumably because there are
no discs attached).

Second, I finally located some jumpers, and have checked all the settings
on the two hard drives and the CDRW drive; they all show up correctly in
the BIOS POST screen, so that seems fine.

Third, I tried to swap out the video card -- you never know -- only to
find that I don't have a spare PCIe video card to put in its place, and
the video cards I do have aren't PCI.  But one good thing came of that.
When I put the video card back in and reseated everything, then, for one
brief shining moment, the Gentoo install disc booted all the way up into
the framebuffer (hi Tux!) until freezing at the "loading drivers etc. into
memory" message.  An immediate cold reboot, however, did not get as far as
the framebuffer, That makes it likely that some piece of hardware is just
flaky.  Probably not the CDR drive, since I've had the same behaviour out
of two drives and three cables.  So now I'm guessing either the video card
itself, the motherboard, or the power supply.

Fourth, tried Knoppix, and, like SysRescueCD, it fails to load with the
message that the data is corrupt.  Odd, since, like SysRescue, it boots
just fine on other equipment.


From here I could try to run down a Really Old install disc, to see what
happens.  Or haunt a few electronics stores to find an old video card to
swap out the current one.  As for a longer shot, see if there is a BIOS
upgrade in case there is some deep problem there.  But most likely what
I'll do is stick one of the hard drives in another computer, install a
distro there, and see if the $@#!% computer will boot from a regular if
lightweight linux on its master hard drive.

(At some point this will no longer be fun. But not yet.)

-- 
Peter King			 	peter.king at utoronto.ca
Department of Philosophy
170 St. George Street #521
The University of Toronto		    (416)-978-4951 ofc
Toronto, ON  M5R 2M8
       CANADA

http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/

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