[TriLUG] Hardware woes..

[David McDowell]

If you have luck like I've had this last week... don't build your
own!!  it all started when a cpu fan exploded off the cpu (2 clips on
the mobo broke at once).  So I said, Ok, I'll take the opportunity to
get a mobo with gigabit eth and onboard vid so I can reduce power
consuption and have faster backups across my LAN.  Well, SHAME on me
for thinking that should be easy.  My first mobo (Intel
DG965RY)supports P4 3.2 (the cpu I had) but was the wrong chipset, so
I think, OK, I'll go ahead and get a Core 2 Duo since I already spent
$$ on the mobo and ram to go with it (ya, new mobo, new ram too) and
finally when I put it together... and the board needs 2 x 12 power
from the psu, not 2 x 10, so I get a new psu.  Finally power... and
the board was DOA.  I exchange it, the next board is completely not
compatible with linux, and proven so by google searches.  Also, in
depth reading trying to make it work shows that mobo should have still
worked with 2 x 10 power, but I could have never known since the first
one was DOA and I didn't know it yet!!  So, I return the 2nd mobo,
exchanged for an aBit IB9.  It's BIOS is well over a year old (thanks
again Tiger Direct for maintaining shitty stock) and b/c of this, the
IDE chain thinks it is the SATA and the SATA thinks it is the IDE.
And well, if you can't boot the system anyway, how are you going to
flash the BIOS??  So I take that one back.  Oh, that board didn't have
onboard video, so I had to buy an 8MB PCI video card to go with it.  I
had to argue with the TD manager and throw higher intellect around,
but walked out without paying the 15% restock fee.  In the meantime I
got an Intel DG33FB, SATA HD and a SATA DVDROM (so at this point I've
replaced EVERYTHING except the case).  This board has IDE, but would
not recognize or boot from the IDE chain, nor could I repair the
install on the IDE harddrive so it would work with the new chipset
(thus the SATA purchase).  CentOS 4.5 install had to be booted:  linux
pci-nommconf and that eventually had to be added to grub.conf after I
got the most updated kernel-smp installed.  After that, everything has
been fine.  What a NIGHTMARE!!

So, this is what happens when small things break, then you don't
realize that your are stepping into a world of chipsets that is
apparently too new???  *shrugs*  My next purchase will be a Dell,
something like a 950 or 1950 that I know works... no more "build your
own" for me.  some of you are probably laughing b/c you experienced me
going through this last week.  If you've read this far, hope you got a
good laugh out of it!  Moral - don't be me!  :p

Best of luck with your machine upgrade,
David



On 10/14/07, David Brain <dbrain at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I just had one of my home boxes die (mobo or CPU dead), it was an old
> but useful box (running Gentoo - and doing a very good job of it too).
>  Of course now it's sufficiently old that there's no realistic
> possibility of buying new replacement components, so I'm left with two
> choices - spend a couple of hundred $ buying a whole new MB, CPU,
> memory etc.. etc.. etc.. or asking nicely to see if any Trilug members
> have anything they are willing to trade/sell.
>
> So - does anyone have a Socket A Mobo and CPU lying around somewhere
> they'd be willing to get rid of, ideally with integrated video (as it
> would be replacing a Abit VA-10 - which had built in unichrome)?
>
> Thanks,
>
> David.
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