Followup:
That pesky motherboard (same Intel D865GLC as I'm using in a couple other
successful Trisquel 7 installations) just wouldn't cooperate, even after I
raised it up away from the case with some nifty standoffs, so I set it aside
and got another one from a different source and then swapped out the original
Pentium 4 CPU, fan & cooling block into the replacement, which cured the
problem. Short version: the torso transplant saved the head. Three different
power supplies helped, too ... It's really a frankenputer now, fer sher: it's
composed of all leftover & recycled parts, except for a bag of screws from
the 'puter store and the Windowless HDD with which I started this thread.
Then I discovered that grub couldn't wake up the Trisquel 7 installation that
I had made while the HDD was plugged into a USB port on my laptop. Changing
the flag on the root partition of that Trisquel 7 installation didn't revive
it, so I just burned a Trisquel 7 live DVD and let it have its way with that
HDD, to which I hadn't yet added any data.
Result: a painless Trisquel 7 installation in spite of all the complications
related before in this thread.
One piece of advice: Be sure to look up grub's password with "sudo cat
/etc/grub.d/01_PASSWORD" before moving that HDD and its installed OS onto the
target desktop, 'cuz if you can't get the primary Trisquel 7 OS to boot up,
you're not gonna get to the console to fix the situation. I had to take
everything apart and re-marry that HDD with the laptop to retrieve grub's
password.
Final result: a desktop PC with a circa 2004 MB with Pentium 4, 4GB RAM and
two 320GB HDD's. Great for everything except gaming. Trisquel 7 installs
painlessly with the best graphics resolution that the monitor can manage and
the correct aspect ratio, all by default ... no frustrating user adjustments
needed at all.
