Roger Sherman wrote:
>Sorry to address this to the list, but I'm at my wits end, and it's either
>this, or find a service center or something to fix this problem for me,
>and after building this PC, I really don't have the money.
>
>I built a PC about two 1/2 months ago (my first attempt at building a PC),
>and I'm having a booting problem, and a problem with it freezing up, and
>I'm hoping someone could help point me in the right direction,
>troubleshooting wise.
>
>First of all, the system configuration:
>
>Abit KG-7 motherboard
>AMD 1800XP
>512 Meg DDR RAM
>ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder 32mg vid card
>SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 Platinum w/Live Drive
>60 gig Maxtor HD
>generic DVD/CDROM from my old PC, a Compaq presario (which is happily
>gurgling along as a dedicated FTP server now)
>
>Now, it's got a boot problem that is baffling to me - to turn this PC on,
>I have to press the start button, at which point it sounds like it's
>starting up, the HD and all the fans start spinning, but I don't get the
>beep that I get with a successful boot, and there's no video output. So, I
>then have to turn the PC off, unplug it, and plug it back in - at which
>point it will usually start up again.
>
>Now, I do mean it will start up again just from plugging it in - I don't
>have to press the start button. But, sometimes I'll plug it in, and it
>wont start, at which point I'll have to unplug it, then press start, and
>it seems to discharge a little power. Then I plug it in again, and it will
>start. Then I get the beep that it's booting correctly, and I get video
>output and away we go.
>
>Now, I'd live with this problem, if it weren't for the system freezes. The
>first time I turn the PC on each day, there is always a complete freeze of
>the system - and I totally can't get it unfrozen, either by
>Control-Alt-Backspace, or Alt-SysRq-r. My only recourse is to press and
>hold the start button til it shuts down (with this box, you have to hold
>the start button in for 5 seconds to shut it down, for some reason). Using
>the reset button doesn't seem to work.
>
>This system freeze can happen anywhere, too. Sometimes it'll happen when
>Mandrake is actually starting up, once it even happened at a command line
>login (it's set up to start at runlevel 3), but usually it happens about 2
>- 3 minutes after the system is up and running...usually after I've
>started X, and am checking my email.
>
>And I can't let it run all day - the PC actually works great once it gets
>past the booting and system freeze problems (usually the system freeze
>problem happens one or two times, and then the PC will run properly), but
>if I get up and walk away for several hours, then come back, of course the
>monitor will have gone into power save mode, and I jiggle the mouse to
>wake it up, but at that point for some reason the PC will have stopped
>giving video output, and I have to start the whole process over again.
>
>My ideal situation would be to just leave this PC running 24/7, but that
>makes it impossible, obviously.
>
>Now, I've tried several things to fix the problem - a friend told me the
>symptoms are indicative of a hardware incompatability, so I changed the
>HD, the CD-ROM (which is why I have the DVD player in there - I originally
>had a Plextor CD-RW), the power supply, and I took out the SoundBlaster
>and nic card (a linksys nic), although I put those two back in, since it
>didn't seem to make a difference. I also tried disconnecting the floppy
>drive.
>
>Before I replaced the HD and CD-RW, they effectively stopped working with
>this PC, and I'm worried what's currently in there will stop working as
>well, as every time I make a change, things seem to get a little better,
>but never really work right, and then things degenerate. I don't have
>anything else I can swap into this box, so if it continues to degenerate
>with the current config, I'll have to stop using it until I can afford to
>take it to a PC doctor.
>
>Again, sorry for the OT post, but any help anyone can offer would be
>hugely appreciated.
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
>Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
>
OK well finding this line in your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file
Option "DPMS" "on"
and changing it to
Option "DPMS" "off"
will stop the powersaver (then just lock the screen when you leave for a
while).
I would be very concerned about a number of things:
1. The front panel connections to the header need to be
double-checked... It is almost like the power switch is conected to the
"Green" header pins.
2. The motherboard may have an intermittent short. Sspray instant frost
in a few spots to see what happens. If you can reproduce the symptoms
that way, time for a warranty return.
3. The motherboard may be like my experience with Abit, just plain
poorly manufactured, and ready to eat other components. Abit did some
really weird things with dodging around the PCI interrupt storm
generated by Creative Sound cards, and they lost their AMD certification
because of it and were the principal cause of the VIA 686B chipset bug
discovery (resetting every time 100 Mb or more was copied cross-channel
with the IDE). You may have an extreme example of that manufacturing run.
4. I have an ELSA Gloria L card on a Compaq Professional workstation
(dual-processor) which also never wakes from DPMS. I would say it is
likely that the non-waking syndrome is a property of the driver. The
ATi All-in-wonder is AFAIK only partially supported by the XFree
drivers, just as the old ELSA (early attempt at Accelerated 3D without
AGP with three video processors on the card) is not fully supported,
especially with the introduction of Xinerama which incorrectly
recognizes the card as multi-head (my ELSA).
Civileme
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
