Most of Sunday was spent assembling our new MythTV box. When I switched it on that evening, an LED on the motherboard lit up and the VFD display at the front of the case displayed a couple of messages, but that was as far as it went. No fans spun up, no sounds emanated from the motherboard; zip, nada, diddly.
I’ve replaced the RAM, but that didn’t help. I tried short-circuiting the start-up pins on the motherboard, but that didn’t cause a boot, either. I’ve double-checked all the connections and everything is fine. I tried reseating the CPU. All to no avail.
The TV tuner card was also broken, so I’ve sent that back to be exchanged.
My fingertips are still sore from all of the messing around, but at some point I need to try to rule out the power supply as the dodgy factor. If that passes muster, I’ll have to suspect the motherboard.
How tedious.
I had hoped to be well into the software installation at this point, but I don’t even have the hardware working. I find it really tedious to build computers and this is one of the main reasons why. When things don’t work, it’s boredom at best and misery at worst, trying to figure out what the problem is.
Dealing with hardware is definitely one of the least enjoyable parts of system administration; as far as I’m concerned, at least; some people love it, of course.
Is it an ABIT mother board? I bought an ABIT AN8 mother board to upgrade my computer and had all sorts of problems getting it to work. It would freeze on a post code and go no further. After some random fiddlings with very little hardware attached, I managed to get it to boot, installed my OS and upgraded the Bios firmware which solved the problems. Do a google search for the model and see if it is a reoccuring theme. Mine was and I wouldn’t have bought it had I have known
Tim
No, it’s an Asus P5P800 SE. I find nothing odd about it if I search around the Net.
So annoying when that happens. Bearable if you have loads of similar hardware around and can swap to test, but without that luxury…
Speaking of failures, I recently learned a valuable lesson. When I installed a linux box as home server a couple of years ago, I had the option of motherboard RAID-1 or software. Boy was I glad I chose the latter when I recently had to retire the CPU (and the motherboard as that was quite old now as well). I just plugged the disks back into HDA and HDC where they had been on the old motherboard and Fedora Core 2’s default kernel just booted up without a hitch and the mirror active and clean.
OK, one hitch: it paniced on the onboard (tulip, or so it thought) LAN, but I could not be bother to sort it out so I disabled it and stuck the trusty old natsemi PCI card back in.
Now I can say I joined the 64 bit revolution with a nice and speedy top of the range, ehrm, Sempron 2800. Oh well, no use spending more than you have to! 🙂