One step forward, one step sideways
Feb. 28th, 2007 10:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swehSo TigerDirect were doing a barebones system; Pentium 4D 3.0Ghz Dual Core in a 350Watt case. Add a couple of Gb of RAM and send in all the rebate forms and the total comes to around $340. If I've done my sums right and my memory is accurate ('cos I can't be bothered to look up prices now). Sure, it's only a P4 but this will become the most powerful computer I own. I plan on making it a Linux server for mail, usenet, DNS, DHCP and a couple of vmware sessions. Should be fine.
Being barebones everyone arrived seperately and required me to put it all together. So... I swap out the back connector cover, insert the motherboard (mini-ATX!) screw it down, connect the power supply cable. OK... 20 pin, so split the 24pin connector into 20+4 and insert it. Now where does the 4 pin go... otherside of the motherboard, and the cables are tied together. Grr... snip the cable tie and... the 4 pin doesn't fit. WTF? Oh dammit, there's another 4 pin cable and that does fit. So I've made a mess of the cables for no good reason. Ah well. Now connect the case cables (USB, power switch, reset switch etc). So far so good. So then I insert the CPU. Wow, a lot easier than the old socket 478 stuff. And now the CPU fan. And... that requires inserting a backing plate behind the motherboard that the fan assembly connects to. Dammit! This is why I don't like building my own machines; I always make a mistake. Oh well. So I remove everything and stick the backing plate to the motherboard and put it all back together. Smear goo onto the CPU, screw the fan down. Insert the memory.
Before I go any further I want to test this, so plug in a CD drive and boot the Centos 4 boot CD, and run memtest option. Let it run for 2 passes; complete pass. Yay! Hmm, the Linux kernel on this CD isn't SMP so I can't tell if it detects both cores. Let's install onto a spare hard disk. Except... the only spare HD I've got is from my old Ultimate TV box and so is locked at the IDE level. Oops! Every other hard disk I have spare are SCSI! Hmmph. I'll have to do something about that and dig up a spare disk from work or something.
So that seems a solid step forward.
Then I notice my Windows machine (P4 2.66, 1Gb RAM) is sitting at the BIOS prompt failing to boot. Why it tried to reboot I dunno! But it's been doing this a lot recently. I thought it was a Windows problem since it seemed to happen every time I remote desktopped in (rdesktop during the day and by the evening it crashed and rebooted) with IDE errors in the event log. However after earlier failures I ran a total disk scan and everything showed fine. This time I hadn't rdesktop'd in, so I got a little worried. Power cycle and the machine hangs totally after printing the CPU details. Dammit. This is the machine which had a bad CPU fan a couple of years ago and I damaged two pins on the CPU (ground pins, but...) replacing the fan. Maybe the CPU has finally melted... hmmph. Anyway, standard diagnostic procedure... unplugged the hard disks and CD and DVD... nothing. Pull out the IDE cables and... the machine boots! Huh! Hmm, the ATA133 cable is looking very mangled and scrunched up and maybe that was causing the system to hang on IDE scan. Would account for the eventlog errors. So I replace the cable and the machine boots first time.
Hopefully that's that problem fixed! One step sideways :-)
Being barebones everyone arrived seperately and required me to put it all together. So... I swap out the back connector cover, insert the motherboard (mini-ATX!) screw it down, connect the power supply cable. OK... 20 pin, so split the 24pin connector into 20+4 and insert it. Now where does the 4 pin go... otherside of the motherboard, and the cables are tied together. Grr... snip the cable tie and... the 4 pin doesn't fit. WTF? Oh dammit, there's another 4 pin cable and that does fit. So I've made a mess of the cables for no good reason. Ah well. Now connect the case cables (USB, power switch, reset switch etc). So far so good. So then I insert the CPU. Wow, a lot easier than the old socket 478 stuff. And now the CPU fan. And... that requires inserting a backing plate behind the motherboard that the fan assembly connects to. Dammit! This is why I don't like building my own machines; I always make a mistake. Oh well. So I remove everything and stick the backing plate to the motherboard and put it all back together. Smear goo onto the CPU, screw the fan down. Insert the memory.
Before I go any further I want to test this, so plug in a CD drive and boot the Centos 4 boot CD, and run memtest option. Let it run for 2 passes; complete pass. Yay! Hmm, the Linux kernel on this CD isn't SMP so I can't tell if it detects both cores. Let's install onto a spare hard disk. Except... the only spare HD I've got is from my old Ultimate TV box and so is locked at the IDE level. Oops! Every other hard disk I have spare are SCSI! Hmmph. I'll have to do something about that and dig up a spare disk from work or something.
So that seems a solid step forward.
Then I notice my Windows machine (P4 2.66, 1Gb RAM) is sitting at the BIOS prompt failing to boot. Why it tried to reboot I dunno! But it's been doing this a lot recently. I thought it was a Windows problem since it seemed to happen every time I remote desktopped in (rdesktop during the day and by the evening it crashed and rebooted) with IDE errors in the event log. However after earlier failures I ran a total disk scan and everything showed fine. This time I hadn't rdesktop'd in, so I got a little worried. Power cycle and the machine hangs totally after printing the CPU details. Dammit. This is the machine which had a bad CPU fan a couple of years ago and I damaged two pins on the CPU (ground pins, but...) replacing the fan. Maybe the CPU has finally melted... hmmph. Anyway, standard diagnostic procedure... unplugged the hard disks and CD and DVD... nothing. Pull out the IDE cables and... the machine boots! Huh! Hmm, the ATA133 cable is looking very mangled and scrunched up and maybe that was causing the system to hang on IDE scan. Would account for the eventlog errors. So I replace the cable and the machine boots first time.
Hopefully that's that problem fixed! One step sideways :-)
