On Wednesday 19 December 2001 09:18 pm, Kelly McCormick wrote: > Ok, maybe it's just a coincidence, but I have a less than 2 year old > Dell Dimension XPS T550 that just crapped out it's second motherboard. It > first started having problems after I'd had it about 3 months and decided > to try out Mandrake 7.2 within three or four weeks it started having > problems booting. To make a long story a little shorter after about a year > of reformats, and nursing, and complaining to Dell, I convinced myself and > Dell support that it was the mother board. I replaced it, and like magic > all problems went away. About a month ago, I decided that my system had > been relatively stable for too long and decided to give linux another try. > I installed Mandrake 8.1. I have been using it continuously for the last > four weeks and was really starting to enjoy it. Unfortunately this morning > my system is once again dead. Motherboard again appears to have crapped > out. Now personally I have a hard time believing that linux had anything to > do with it, but both times I had been running linux nonstop for approx 1 > month when the problems first appeared. I would be interested to hear any > thoughts any of you may have on this.
Nonstop, eh? I bet you slowly toasted the on-board electrolytic capacitors so that they dried out. Try a bigger case fan to keep it a little cooler inside. Of course memtest-x86.bin is on the mandrake CD under images/ and you can dd it or rawrite it to floppy and maybe it will boot and test your memory just to be safe. What are the dead symptoms? Are fans running or nothing at all? If nothing at all, it can be a shorted cap or other short on the mobo or the power supply. If fans run, look for a dead video card or processor or a bad cap. Heat and drought kill more mobos than any software I am aware of with the exception of some IBM ThinkPads, and we even try to preotect users from that, but a use of lm_sensors/lm_utils can overwrite the PROM controlling the I2C bus on those mothers and there is no way to flash them on board and they are soldered in, so it is a factory return for a new mother. I have had two Dells running for a year or more steadily. They did fail on booting the disks they weresupplied with, which was interesting, because those same disks booted linux without complaint attached to other mothers, and after a month of "rest" the dells were supplied with whatever trash disks hardware testing happened to have and they recognized them. Even the third Dell from a different user which died in exactly the same way--no recognition of hard drive was OK after a month off and with a different hdd. How that happened is that I took the three back to purchasing and the agent there wanted more detail on what was wrong and sent them to hardware testing after a month. SO you may have that problem... If you have another computer what happens if you swap hard drives between the two? Civileme QA Team
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
