[olug] Fun with hardware -or- how I fixed my wife's PC.

[Jon H. Larsen]

Fun with hardware -or- how I fixed my wife's PC.

My wife's PC started having problems a couple weeks ago.  I was receiving 
timeouts with /dev/hda with a Fedora Core 2 install.

Suspecting the hard drive was failing, I booted up with the Fedora rescue 
CD and moved her home directory to my PC as a backup, and so she could 
continue to log in and check her email.  I placed an order for a new 
drive from newegg.  Not a bad idea, as the hard drive in her PC was 
manf. in 1997, so it wasn't un-expected to show problems soon.

I had to order a new drive for my myth box anyway, which had the root 
os drive fail on me the mid-Sept., so I ordered two.  The drives 
arrived in the mail, two nice Seagate 80 GB 7200 RPM, nice and quiet 
compared to the old 13 GB ATA33 Maxtor that was 'failing'.   (The 10 GB 
drive in the myth box that failed was also a Maxtor).

Powered up the system to install FC2, same timeout issues occurred.  I now 
suspected the cables and motherboard.  Both the cables and motherboard 
were only four months old.  Replaced the IDE cables, same problem.

So, I ordered another motherboard for her system, thinking the chipset 
had fried.  I have seen this happen before on other system where the 
motherboard chipset fan had failed, and the chipset burned up.  I got a 
Micro-ATX from Gigabyte, with the same chipset as the previous board, a 
KM400.  Before installing the new motherboard, I changed out the 
original chipset heatsink, which was about 1 CM high, with a Zalman 
NB47J about 4.7 CM high, not wanting the chipset problem to re-occur.  
At $4.99, the Zalman heatsink is a good performance upgrade, so I bought 
two, one for my PC.

I replaced the motherboard and the Problem remained.

So, here I was - new motherboard, new hard drive, new drive cables, 
swapped out the optical drives for some from my old mythtv box 
(DVD-ROM, 24X CDRW) - still at the same point of failure.

So, I replaced the only thing I hadn't swapped out yet, the power supply.  
I took out the Antec 330 Watt unit, and used the spare Antec 330 Watt PS I 
had from my previous myth box build. 

Issue resolved.  

Installed FC2, no problems.

So, technically, the 7 year old 13 GB Maxtor is probably fine.  I'll have 
to test it with the ultimate boot cd utils.  The motherboard is probably 
fine too.  Slap a new processor in and some memory, and I'll have a new 
mythtv frontend for the living room.


Guess I should pick up a Power Supply tester, huh?  Suggestions anyone?

Jon L.

-- 
Jon H. Larsen  - email: relayer (at) levania (dot) org
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