Re: [newbie] Could Mandrake Kill My Motherboard?
I too have had no problems with the Maxtor drive that I am aware of. After thinking about this a bit longer though it occurred to me that I installed this drive right before I installed Mandrake the first time. This is also the drive that I installed Mandrake on. Windows is installed on the first drive. The first time the MB had problems it lasted a bit longer, and never died completely. I was dual booting and only using the Linux/Maxtor drive periodically. The second MB barely lasted 3 months then died. This time the Linux/Maxtor drive was being used exclusively. Another coincidence? I don't know, but atleast it gives me something to try. At any rate, thanks everyone for your help. I didn't intend to turn this list into hardware support, so I will let this thread die here. KM - Original Message - From: poogle [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, December 22, 2001 5:58 AM Subject: Re: [newbie] Could Mandrake Kill My Motherboard? Another Hmmm, I have 5 HDs (in caddies) 1 x Samsung has an old MD 7.2 install still on it and another Samsung with something else on it which my other half insists on using :-) My MD 8.1 install is on a Fujitsu and I use a Maxtor as a backup in case I break something. I also have a Seagate which I use for crashtesting so it gets a fair amount of abuse. Both the Maxtor Seagate drives came from computer fairs, were labelled untested buy at your own risk and cost next to nothing, surprisingly, despite the warning label both have and are giving reliable service on my home-made AMD K6-2 450 machine and I've had them for a couple of years and put them to many different uses in that time. On Friday 21 December 2001 18:37 pm, you wrote: On Thursday 20 December 2001 23:55, you wrote: I have seen a hard drive (if I remember correctly it was either a maxtor or seagate) where almost the same symptoms happened, judgeing form your list of symptoms (this was in a winders box, about the time windows 98 came out). I never did know exactly why the hard drive gave those symptoms, but changing the hard drive finally cured the box. (I had changed even the power supply in the box, as well as fans added and all kinds of stuff) in spite of good readings from it after about the third MB in 3 months. never had a nother problem with the box, put the HD in a totally different box and two months later, had an additional spare cpu since the MB was trashed again. snip Hmm, that's interesting, one of the HD's is a Maxtor, not sure what the other is. KM -- Poogle Registered Linux user 182657 (added to sig for the benefit of those irritated by it) Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Could Mandrake Kill My Motherboard?
Another Hmmm, I have 5 HDs (in caddies) 1 x Samsung has an old MD 7.2 install still on it and another Samsung with something else on it which my other half insists on using :-) My MD 8.1 install is on a Fujitsu and I use a Maxtor as a backup in case I break something. I also have a Seagate which I use for crashtesting so it gets a fair amount of abuse. Both the Maxtor Seagate drives came from computer fairs, were labelled untested buy at your own risk and cost next to nothing, surprisingly, despite the warning label both have and are giving reliable service on my home-made AMD K6-2 450 machine and I've had them for a couple of years and put them to many different uses in that time. On Friday 21 December 2001 18:37 pm, you wrote: On Thursday 20 December 2001 23:55, you wrote: I have seen a hard drive (if I remember correctly it was either a maxtor or seagate) where almost the same symptoms happened, judgeing form your list of symptoms (this was in a winders box, about the time windows 98 came out). I never did know exactly why the hard drive gave those symptoms, but changing the hard drive finally cured the box. (I had changed even the power supply in the box, as well as fans added and all kinds of stuff) in spite of good readings from it after about the third MB in 3 months. never had a nother problem with the box, put the HD in a totally different box and two months later, had an additional spare cpu since the MB was trashed again. snip Hmm, that's interesting, one of the HD's is a Maxtor, not sure what the other is. KM -- Poogle Registered Linux user 182657 (added to sig for the benefit of those irritated by it) Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Could Mandrake Kill My Motherboard?
Problem is mostly Dell. They buy so many mobo's from Intel that they have the hammer to tell Intel just how to make 'em. Hence they're not really Intel mobo's, but 'oem spec only' mobo's. Many corners are cut, often features/hardware found in even low end retail boards, or Intel's 'regular' boards, are left off, and/or are of reduced quality (one good example is capacitors, both number and quality). A quality bios is not to be found. Probly a Phoenix oem spec only bios is used. Figured as much about the quality level. Yep, phoenix it is. Retail Intel mobo's OTOH, while low performers and lack configurability, are mostly bulletproof when it comes to reliability and stabiltility. This isn't really just a Dell problem (ie, cruddy motherboards, bios, et al). All large ready made vendors do the same thing, and it's not limited to just the mobo. All the components in ready made systems are 'oem spec only', aka 'proprietary'. As the audience for cheap (even if they aren't) ready made PC's increases, the quality of ready mades drops even further. This has all been goin on longer than the 'less than two years' since your Dell was assembled. That said, your mobo problems probly result from the inferior spec mobo's and power supplies that Dell uses. Dell is also not renowned for payin much attention to case and heatsink cooling either. To save a buck or so, most Dell models don't even have fans on heatsinks that need one, or even heatsinks on some components that normally should have one, much less also with a fan (eg, video card). Have you ever heard Intel advertise that they make mobo's for Dell? I believe they tryin hide the fact. I suspect it's also why Dell has been reluctant to move to AMD cpu's. The oem spec only boards they use will only marginally work with Intel cpu's. It's also why they only give lip service to providin an OS other than Windoze. It's called WinTel, low quality components and even non-hardware that Windoze can run, sort'a kind'a. So no, Mandrake didn't kill your mobo, Dell and Gates did. .. YMMV -- Tom Brinkman Corpus Christi, Texas, USA lol, ok, thanks for the opinion and helping convince me to build my own system next time. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Could Mandrake Kill My Motherboard?
Yes they are the same hard drives, no changes have been made to the hardware with the exception of a replacement MB with an updated bios. worth noting that this was only one time, and I was looking at about a dozen boxes a day during that time frame, for over a year right then. ( I don't even have an excuse to use a computer these days, and not in the IT industry at all anymore) so out of over 1000 boxes (most were new roll my own, as the customer ordered them) 1 had this kinda problem. I still can remember this one. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Could Mandrake Kill My Motherboard?
On Thursday 20 December 2001 23:55, you wrote: I have seen a hard drive (if I remember correctly it was either a maxtor or seagate) where almost the same symptoms happened, judgeing form your list of symptoms (this was in a winders box, about the time windows 98 came out). I never did know exactly why the hard drive gave those symptoms, but changing the hard drive finally cured the box. (I had changed even the power supply in the box, as well as fans added and all kinds of stuff) in spite of good readings from it after about the third MB in 3 months. never had a nother problem with the box, put the HD in a totally different box and two months later, had an additional spare cpu since the MB was trashed again. snip Hmm, that's interesting, one of the HD's is a Maxtor, not sure what the other is. KM Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Could Mandrake Kill My Motherboard?
On Fri, 21 Dec 2001 13:09:43 -0500 Ed Tharp [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yes they are the same hard drives, no changes have been made to the hardware with the exception of a replacement MB with an updated bios. worth noting that this was only one time, and I was looking at about a dozen boxes a day during that time frame, for over a year right then. ( I don't even have an excuse to use a computer these days, and not in the IT industry at all anymore) so out of over 1000 boxes (most were new roll my own, as the customer ordered them) 1 had this kinda problem. I still can remember this one. Since no one else has mentioned this have tried replacing the battery on the MOBO and then re-setting the BIOS. Charles Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Could Mandrake Kill My Motherboard?
snip On Thursday 20 December 2001 23:55, you wrote: I have seen a hard drive (if I remember correctly it was either a maxtor or seagate) where almost the same symptoms happened, judgeing form your list of symptoms (this was in a winders box, about the time windows 98 came out). I never did know exactly why the hard drive gave those symptoms, but changing the hard drive finally cured the box. (I had changed even the power supply in the box, as well as fans added and all kinds of stuff) in spite of good readings from it after about the third MB in 3 months. never had a nother problem with the box, put the HD in a totally different box and two months later, had an additional spare cpu since the MB was trashed again. Yes they are the same hard drives, no changes have been made to the hardware with the exception of a replacement MB with an updated bios. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Could Mandrake Kill My Motherboard?
- Original Message - From: Ed Tharp [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2001 6:20 PM Subject: Re: [newbie] Could Mandrake Kill My Motherboard? On Thursday 20 December 2001 17:41, you wrote: Can you say Ground Fault? I agree w/Jose, most likely problem. I have never seen (does not mean it don't happen) the MB toast from Linux, but it is worth noteing, in my opinion anyway, that you well can toast the monitor by driving it beyond it's specs. it will toast a few weeks after the change. ( I did two in four weeks time). An additional question, where you using the same (exact, not same model and make but the same physical box and serial number) hard drives with both MB? Thanks for the monitor warning, I should be ok there as I was aware that this was possible. Yes they are the same hard drives, no changes have been made to the hardware with the exception of a replacement MB with an updated bios. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Could Mandrake Kill My Motherboard?
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
Re: [newbie] Could Mandrake Kill My Motherboard?
Thanks for the quick response civil! Nonstop, eh? Err, ok, I guess I meant exclusively although the system does get a LOT of usage, I do sleep once in a while! ;) 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. I'm sure this couldn't hurt, but the marathon Quake3 sessions that I used to put this box through under windoze never seemed to cause a problem. Since replacing the first MB the heaviest workout this thing has seen is running mozilla, and windoze98 before I installed Mandrake. 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. Bootup never makes it to accessing the floppy, not an option. 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. At powerup, fans are on, power is getting to both hard drives, dvd, and cdrom. Can't tell if floppy drive has power. Monitor powers up but stays black most of the time, once in a while will make it to dell splash screen . Keyboard and mouse both show signs of life, but nothing else. Indicator lights on back say that the bios, memory, pci/isa bus, and video card all failed. SNIP- 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. That's strange, noticed something similar the first time I had this problem, system would boot up after letting it sit powered down for a full day or two, but would soon go into a self rebooting loop and eventually not boot. I'm afraid I'm not patient enough to try waiting a month though. lol SO you may have that problem... If you have another computer what happens if you swap hard drives between the two? Hard drives are fine, checked that, they are simply not even being accessed at power up. Civileme QA Team I guess what I'm looking for is any possible reason why mandrake would put more stress on my MB than windoze? I can't afford to keep replacing the MB after the warranty on this thing runs out, and every time I try running linux on it I end up with MB problems. I'd hate to be stuck in windoze hell because of this. One thing that seems like a potential suspect is the power management feature. I never use this in win98 since it just resulted in a locked up system, but have been using it in mandrake. (for those occasions when I do sleep) When my monitor goes into standby mode, the indicator light on the front is supposed to turn from green to amber, instead it blinks back and forth between the two. Also I have seen one of the monitors adjustment screens pop up briefly on a few occasions. Doesn't stay long enough to tell which one. Is it possible that power management is actually constantly turning the monitor off and on and so burning up something on the MB? Or am I just grasping at straws here? Thanks in advance, Kelly Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Could Mandrake Kill My Motherboard?
On Thu, 2001-12-20 at 11:17, Kelly McCormick wrote: Thanks for the quick response civil! Nonstop, eh? Err, ok, I guess I meant exclusively although the system does get a LOT of usage, I do sleep once in a while! ;) 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. I'm sure this couldn't hurt, but the marathon Quake3 sessions that I used to put this box through under windoze never seemed to cause a problem. Since replacing the first MB the heaviest workout this thing has seen is running mozilla, and windoze98 before I installed Mandrake. 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. Bootup never makes it to accessing the floppy, not an option. 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. At powerup, fans are on, power is getting to both hard drives, dvd, and cdrom. Can't tell if floppy drive has power. Monitor powers up but stays black most of the time, once in a while will make it to dell splash screen . Keyboard and mouse both show signs of life, but nothing else. Indicator lights on back say that the bios, memory, pci/isa bus, and video card all failed. SNIP- 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. That's strange, noticed something similar the first time I had this problem, system would boot up after letting it sit powered down for a full day or two, but would soon go into a self rebooting loop and eventually not boot. I'm afraid I'm not patient enough to try waiting a month though. lol SO you may have that problem... If you have another computer what happens if you swap hard drives between the two? Hard drives are fine, checked that, they are simply not even being accessed at power up. Civileme QA Team I guess what I'm looking for is any possible reason why mandrake would put more stress on my MB than windoze? I can't afford to keep replacing the MB after the warranty on this thing runs out, and every time I try running linux on it I end up with MB problems. I'd hate to be stuck in windoze hell because of this. One thing that seems like a potential suspect is the power management feature. I never use this in win98 since it just resulted in a locked up system, but have been using it in mandrake. (for those occasions when I do sleep) When my monitor goes into standby mode, the indicator light on the front is supposed to turn from green to amber, instead it blinks back and forth between the two. Also I have seen one of the monitors adjustment screens pop up briefly on a few occasions. Doesn't stay long enough to tell which one. Is it possible that power management is actually constantly turning the monitor off and on and so burning up something on the MB? Or am I just grasping at straws here? Thanks in advance, Kelly =_1008884634-11608-820 Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Ummm, I think that is a straw. It is likely a BIOS bug... Try disconnecting everything but floppy and then downloading the most recent BIOS from DELL and seeing if you can flash it, assuming you have access to a computer to do those things (That's a use [finally] for internet cafes besides good coffee). The Dells we had would _never_ recognize the original drives again, and we were using Optiplex GX-110, which is supposed to be one of their better products. We do have to remember that Dell is under the same stress as the others for cost-sensitivity and therefore is forced to cut corners to stay alive. I know the floppies on those models are so cheap, they cannot even report the size of mounted media. Civileme Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
RE: [newbie] Could Mandrake Kill My Motherboard?
Can you say Ground Fault? If you are finding that you have to keep replacing electronic components associated with a computer, and have external devices plugged in, the FIRST thing you should look for is a ground fault. It is likely that this is shorting out your motherboards over the course of a few days/weeks it takes to degrade the CAPs via the ground fault assault. Make sure that ALL of the devices plugged into your computer are in turn plugged into the SAME power strip with proper plug polarity observed. If you have a LAN, TV-TUNER, Printer, etc. which connects elsewhere also be sure that it's not to blame. A 9-20 volt fault leakage may not burn your computer out in a day, but it will over time causing exactly the type of problem you are seeing... I.E. a few weeks of use the a new motherboard. Just a though. -JMS -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of tester Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2001 5:15 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [newbie] Could Mandrake Kill My Motherboard? On Thu, 2001-12-20 at 11:17, Kelly McCormick wrote: Thanks for the quick response civil! Nonstop, eh? Err, ok, I guess I meant exclusively although the system does get a LOT of usage, I do sleep once in a while! ;) Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Could Mandrake Kill My Motherboard?
On Thursday 20 December 2001 01:18 am, 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. Problem is mostly Dell. They buy so many mobo's from Intel that they have the hammer to tell Intel just how to make 'em. Hence they're not really Intel mobo's, but 'oem spec only' mobo's. Many corners are cut, often features/hardware found in even low end retail boards, or Intel's 'regular' boards, are left off, and/or are of reduced quality (one good example is capacitors, both number and quality). A quality bios is not to be found. Probly a Phoenix oem spec only bios is used. Retail Intel mobo's OTOH, while low performers and lack configurability, are mostly bulletproof when it comes to reliability and stabiltility. This isn't really just a Dell problem (ie, cruddy motherboards, bios, et al). All large ready made vendors do the same thing, and it's not limited to just the mobo. All the components in ready made systems are 'oem spec only', aka 'proprietary'. As the audience for cheap (even if they aren't) ready made PC's increases, the quality of ready mades drops even further. This has all been goin on longer than the 'less than two years' since your Dell was assembled. That said, your mobo problems probly result from the inferior spec mobo's and power supplies that Dell uses. Dell is also not renowned for payin much attention to case and heatsink cooling either. To save a buck or so, most Dell models don't even have fans on heatsinks that need one, or even heatsinks on some components that normally should have one, much less also with a fan (eg, video card). Have you ever heard Intel advertise that they make mobo's for Dell? I believe they tryin hide the fact. I suspect it's also why Dell has been reluctant to move to AMD cpu's. The oem spec only boards they use will only marginally work with Intel cpu's. It's also why they only give lip service to providin an OS other than Windoze. It's called WinTel, low quality components and even non-hardware that Windoze can run, sort'a kind'a. So no, Mandrake didn't kill your mobo, Dell and Gates did. .. YMMV -- Tom Brinkman Corpus Christi, Texas, USA Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Could Mandrake Kill My Motherboard?
On Thursday 20 December 2001 17:41, you wrote: Can you say Ground Fault? I agree w/Jose, most likely problem. I have never seen (does not mean it don't happen) the MB toast from Linux, but it is worth noteing, in my opinion anyway, that you well can toast the monitor by driving it beyond it's specs. it will toast a few weeks after the change. ( I did two in four weeks time). An additional question, where you using the same (exact, not same model and make but the same physical box and serial number) hard drives with both MB? Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
