At my wits end

[Joe Musser]

I have just built a new computer, gigabyte board ga ma 785 us2h, 4 gbs of ram, 2 sata hard drives, and 2 ide optical drives, AMD athlon II x2 CPU. When I first built it the motherboard would not post, found it was a power supply issue and installed an 850 watt thermaltake black widow Power supply. Installed windows 7 and everything was fantastic it worked great for about 2 weeks or so, then things started to go wrong, first windows media was acting odd, then the optical drives stopped working then the ethernet port crapped out, so I thought I had a bum install and tried reloading, after I formatted and partitioned my drive I was unable to load windows 7 at all, it kept telling me either I could not load to this partition because my machine might not be able to boot from thid drive, or it would get the whole way to exoanding files and just sit there, and thats if it would post at all, sometimes it would stall at the DMI pool. I tried many different settings and hardware configurations to no avail, I did find out tho that only the sata channel 4 would see hard the hard drive, if I plugged it in anywhere else it would freeze.
So I loaded windows XP and it was able to do that but now I cant load any drivers what so ever, audio doesnt work, video is questionable, and the optical drives won't do squat. After all this I figured my bios was totally farked up so I flashed it with the latest version for my board, still acting exactly the same way.

Anyone have any thoughts? I am starting to think the ide controller on the motherboard has gone out.

I know this was a long post but I have had good luck with help from this forum before and I hope someone can help me out now.

Thank you J M

[kiosk]

You have a faulty power supply.

[Fruss Tray Ted]

Well I'm thinking motherboard but first thing to try is a barebones boot. Then try a live disk such as Knoppix or Ubuntu but still with as few devices attached as possible. Add one at a time back until you find either the problem or your PSU reaches it's limit in ability to run the peripherals.

[Joe Musser]

Well heres where my ignorance shows, but I don't know what you mean by a Live disk, do you mean a disk I can boot from and operate from? I have an old copy of Linux I can do that with. I have heard of ubuntu but dont know what it is and have never heard of knoppix. I did however try a bare bones boot early on with just one dvd drive hooked up and was able to boot to my acronis disk with no problems

[risk_reversal]

Joe Musser said:
Well heres where my ignorance shows, but I don't know what you mean by a Live disk, do you mean a disk I can boot from and operate from? I have an old copy of Linux I can do that with. I have heard of ubuntu but dont know what it is and have never heard of knoppix.
Download a Linux Live cd and burn the (.iso) to cd. Then boot from that cd.

Many flavours of Linux about your choice which one you pick. I usually use Puppy since it is a relatively small download (about 100mb), will load in ram and once on the Linux desktop, you can take the cd out.

Good Luck

PS. Have you checked the boot drive with the manufacturer's utility to rule out HD error.

[Sylvander]

Just an hour back I burned this lupu-006.iso (http://www.diddywahdiddy.net/Puppy500/lupu-006.iso) to a CD-RW disk and booted it.
Got it at this thread = Lucid Puppy 006 - Woof of April 7 + Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 (http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=404835#404835)
This is a VERY recently developed Puppy that uses the Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 repositories.
Has some rather nice new features I notice.

When you boot the CD, you will be asked to specify config settings to suit your hardware...
[mouse, keyboard, language, timezone (e.g. choose Europe/London, not GMT+/-)]
Once you [finish that, and] get to the desktop...
[Use Menu->System->GParted to partition a Flash Drive (see below), and format the partitions (ext3 or FAT32?), then] reboot, and at shut-down choose to make a pupsave file when asked.
I recommend you choose make a 1GB pupsave, and hold that on a 1.2GB partition made on the connected Flash Drive.
[You can make more than 1 of these, each to hold a pupsave for different Puppies]
This pupsave holds your Puppy's Linux file system, on which are held all your configurations and installations of additional programs.
When asked, its also a good idea to also save a copy of the SFS file from the CD [it will automatically copy to the same partition as the pupsave].

The beauty of using the optical disk and Flash Drive...
Is that your internal HDD isn't being used/touched at all.
There are also other benefits = you can [make a certain change to a certain file so you will be asked and can] choose not to save sessions back to the pupsave...
Hence you can eliminate unfortunate changes [mis-configurations?]

You [like me] may decide you like Puppy better than Windows, and choose to use it as your number-1 operating system. :)
I'm typing this from Firefox within BoxPup-413 [yet another SUPERB Puppy Linux puplet].

Computer stops at verifying dmi pool data. (http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000474.htm)

[Paul Komski]

The intrinsic problem relates almost certainly to an item (or items) of hardware and/or the way they are configured or connected.

One particular comment caught my eye "I tried many different settings and hardware configurations to no avail, I did find out tho that only the sata channel 4 would see hard the hard drive, if I plugged it in anywhere else it would freeze" because this implies a mobo or power supply problem (including loose SATA power and/or data cables) or, less likely I believe, an intrinsic problem with an internal drive. It should also be said that inappropriate or flaky RAM can cause all sorts of weird results as can a bad CMOS battery.

Live CDs (http://www.paulski.com/zpages.php?id=1813) (whether they be Linux, Windows or DOS based utilities) can be helpful in identifying the culprit(s) but examining the BIOS setup to see if the four attached drives are correctly identified or not is usually the best starting point in a system that POSTS without an error warning.

In systems that freeze, fail to POST, etc then, as already suggested, do a bare bones boot (http://www.paulski.com/zpages.php?id=1718) and only add one more piece of hardware at a time if the bbb POSTs normally. It is unlikely that a second PSU of that power is the culprit but it is by no means an impossibility and the only way to check that out is by swapping in a known good PSU.

Good luck because one expects a new build to be plain-sailing but when it isn't the case one can sometimes go on and on having problems until one replaces the motherboard.

[Joe Musser]

Well I definetly have a few good ideas to try, my work schedule is loaded right now but I will try some stuff over the weekend, I will post what I find but I suspect I will be buying a new motherboard soon. Thanks Guys for all your help J M

[Joe Musser]

Well I downloaded the Puppy and burned it to a disk, and I was unable to boot from it. Either I downloaded something wrong or I have more issues than I thought J M

[Sylvander]

1. Did you burn the ISO to the optical disk as an image, not just as a file?

2. What did you see on screen whilst loading the Puppy?
Did the Puppy begin loading?
Any problem reported?

3. Try this Puppy derivative:
LighthousePup-4.43-Gu2.iso (http://lhpup.org/release/lhp443/LighthousePup-4.43-Gu2.iso)
md5sum = faf4f7059e4875711b8b717f6aa6c687 LighthousePup-4.43-Gu2.iso

It was got at this thread. (http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=47588)

Puppy Linux Boot Up (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGcH45ZdCDo&feature=related).

[Joe Musser]

I see now, I only burned it as a file and not an image like you said. I am not sure how to burn it as an image, I am on my computer at work an not even sure if I can do that here, but if you can explain it to me I will give it a shot.
Thanx J M

[Joe Musser]

OK I do believe I've got it now, I use Roxio Creator here at work so i downloaded the file to my desktop, then I burned it as an image to the CD, I am going to try it in my laptop and if all goes well I should have a good copy of puppy to try at home. Thanx again for all your help so far, you guys are a great bunch of folks and have been able to lend me so much help in the past that i hope one day to be able to pass that along and help others.

J M

[Joe Musser]

That worked splendidly, I am online using puppy lighthouse and my laptop at work, I only hope that the IT techs dont notice and get all techy on me. But I know the disk works and I cant wait to get home and try this on the trouble child, I will post my results as soon as possible Thanx J M

[Sylvander]

1. If you want to just try a Puppy on any particular hardware, and don't want to install or leave any trace behind...
When you shut down at the end of the [1st?] session, don't make a pupsave file when asked.

2. Only make a pupsave on the machine for which you want the Puppy to save config settings etc.

3. If you make the pupsave on a Flash Drive...
I think it's possible to take that [and the CD] to a different machine, and use it on that.
The Puppy will detect the different hardware and ask you to choose different configurations to suit the changed items.

4. The Lucid Puppy is in the experimental stage.
The Lighthouse Puppy is a safer bet.

[Sylvander]

1. Here's my Lighthouse-4.43f desktop after a few easy configuration tweaks. (http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showpost.php?p=446031&postcount=20)

2. Let me know if you'd like me to give instructions...
On how to save sessions back to the pupsave on a Flash Drive...
ONLY if you choose to.
[I like having this ability :) ]

[Paul Komski]

We wait, with interest, to see if the problem desktop's drives will function and be accessible from Puppy, etc.

[Joe Musser]

OK. Well I'm home and just popped the CD in. It gets to performing a switch root to the layered file system...kernel panic. Not syncing. Attempted to kill init
So that's where I'm at sitting here staring at the screen and typing this on my Droid. J. M.

[Sylvander]

I'm not a Puppy expert, but...

I think that's a significant clue.

I believe THIS->["kernel panic. Not syncing. Attempted to kill init"] IS an indicator that...
There isn't enough [FUNCTIONAL] RAM to take the files that Puppy is attempting to load into RAM from the optical disk.

i.e. The ISO file is 215MB...
So you need about 256MB of RAM to take that.

The problem PC has 4GB of RAM, which is MORE than enough...
IF IT IS FUNCTIONAL. :( :confused:

Suggest to me that the PC in question has a RAM problem.

If no Puppy expert comes forward here with a definite explanation, you should post a thread at the Puppy Linux forums (http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/).

Try another live Linux CD [Knoppix?] and see if that also has a problem loading.

[looseSCREWorTWO]

G'day Joe,
Intermittent problems are always the biggest P. I. T. A. First off, you need a selection of 3 or 4 Puppy Linux bootable CDs that you can download, burn and verify by running on another PC. I'm no "expert", but I have installed Puppy on 9 or 10 PCs in the last few months and these are the versions of Puppy I believe to be the most reliable on the widest range of hardware:

- Puppy 4.2.1 and Puppy 4.2.1 Retro
download both from here: http://ftp.nluug.nl/ftp/pub/os/Linux/distr/puppylinux/

- Puppy 2.14 Revisited. Download from here: http://puppylinux.ca/tpp/ttuuxxx/2.14series/testing/214X-RC5.iso You'll be prompted for a Username and Password. User=puppy Password=linux

- Puppy 4.3.1. Download from here: http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/puppy-4.3.1/

Is the Hard Disk flaky?
To test, take it out of the equation by installing Puppy to a bootable USB Pen Drive (Sylvander knows more about that than I do) and see if that works on your system. This takes the HD right out of the picture, so if problems recur you'll know it isn't the HD that's to blame.

Is it RAM?
If you have 2 or more sticks of RAM, you could cut this back to just one stick and make up for the shortfall with a Swap partition. Like a Pagefile in Windows, a Linux Swap partition is part of the HD used by Puppy as "virtual RAM". If you have, say, 1gb RAM and 3gb Swap, if the problems recur you could try moving the RAM stick to another slot and/or try using a different stick of RAM to see what happens.

I can help you set up Swap Partition - it's very easy to do in Puppy.

Having eliminated HD and RAM, the only other thing it could be is the CPU or Motherboard, or the connections between various devices.

[looseSCREWorTWO]

If the CMOS battery is starting to die, leave the PC switched off and disconnected from mains power for a few days. When you switch on, if Time and Date settings in BIOS are still accurate, then it's not the CMOS battery.

[Paul Komski]

OK - we have been on the Puppy detour and now have a functional Live CD (on another system) that fails on the problem PC. This simply tends to confirm that there is an underlying hardware problem that needs to be identified if possible.

Yes RAM is a possibility as is a hard drive as is a PSU and so on. The only way to really find the culprit it to swap in known good components and starting-out with a bare bones boot. A PC with ANY bad piece of hardware can fail to start up.

[Joe Musser]

Yes That is my next step, I don't have a lot of spare parts lying around, but I have a friend that does so I will take the pain in the *** to his place in the morning and start swapping parts about. BTW I tried to register over at the puppy forum and it keeps telling me that I dont type in the secret code thingy right, any thoughts on that one. I will keep trying since I liked what I saw so far of it and want to fool with it a bit more. I will post whatever I find soon Thanks all J M

[Sylvander]

1. "it keeps telling me that I dont type in the secret code thingy right"
Huh!? What secret code? :confused:
Username and password?
Are you using Firefox with NoScript, and not allowing scripts on the site?

2. A thought:
If the problem is being caused by RAM...
You might try making [on some other PC] a Linux swap partition...
On some [expendable] Flash Drive...
Or external USB HDD.
As the Puppy attempts to load it will seek, find, and automatically use the swap partition.
That plus whatever usable memory exists, may be enough to get the Puppy to load successfully.
Worth a try since it's easy to do.

3. The more different live Linux CD's fail to load on the problem PC; the more confirmation you have that it's not an OS problem [it's probably hardware].

[Paul Komski]

Is this the sort of "secret code"?

http://clip2net.com/clip/m0/1271416582-clip-18kb.jpg

[looseSCREWorTWO]

G'day Joe,
if the "Puppy Forum secret code thingy" is on a website like this:

http://puppylinux.ca/puppyfiles

User Name=puppy
Password=linux

Be aware that in Linux lower-case is not the same as UPPER-CASE. Also, a Puppy Live CD which works on one PC might NOT work on another PC. the 3 or 4 versions of Puppy I Posted last time are the ones i've found to work with the widest variety of old PCs. However the same thing applies to late-model hardware. 2009 Toshiba laptops, for example, are known to run perfectly on Puppy 421 Retro (designed for old PCs) but won't even Boot on Puppy 421, which is the same package of programs built around a later Linux Kernel.

Good luck with it !!!

Steve

[Whyzman]

Have you tried Paul's suggestion to barebones boot??

[Joe Musser]

Is this the sort of "secret code"?

http://clip2net.com/clip/m0/1271416582-clip-18kb.jpg

Aye thats the "code thingy" I type it in just as it looks and it says I haven't

[Joe Musser]

Well I took everything apart and started from scratch, one piece at a time. Turns out it was the motherboard, used a spare one from my buddies shop and used my CPU, my memory, my optical drives, my hard drives,etc and everything worked just as it should. reassembled with all my parts including my motherboard and i had the same old same old, just for ****s and giggles I changed the motherboard battery, didn't help. So now i get to fight with GB since I still have the three year warranty but I'm not holding my breath, in fact I bought a new one this morning and it should be here tommorow.
Thanx Guys for all the help Jm

[Whyzman]

Usually, most of the motherboard manufacturers are pretty good about replacements. If you purchased another one, I'd say they would be reluctant to give you your money back on the bad one.

Did you contact the manufacturer to see about RMAing (return merchandise authorization) the bad one first??

[Paul Komski]

We assume you did type all in the correct case. Sometimes such Captcha checks need two or three goes with a different set of letters - don't ask me why. I agree - ask for an RMA and get a replacement. You then have a spare or a sale for eBay.

[PieceOfMadness]

Well I took everything apart and started from scratch, one piece at a time. Turns out it was the motherboard, used a spare one from my buddies shop and used my CPU, my memory, my optical drives, my hard drives,etc and everything worked just as it should. reassembled with all my parts including my motherboard and i had the same old same old, just for ****s and giggles I changed the motherboard battery, didn't help. So now i get to fight with GB since I still have the three year warranty but I'm not holding my breath, in fact I bought a new one this morning and it should be here tommorow.
Thanx Guys for all the help Jm

The problem still might be that the RAM wasn't compatible with the motherboard. Gigabyte's USA site has a list of RAM that they claim has been tested and verified compatible with the motherboard, so maybe punch in your mobo's model number and see if the RAM you have is listed or not.

Portatech.com's tech support says they don't really test the RAM, they just get paid to put that manufacturer's name on the good RAM list. Not sure how true that is, but it does make a bit of sense. I'd really like to believe the RAM they recommend for a specific mobo has actually been tested. My computer had this type of problem and it turned out that buying RAM that was on the verified list (this was for a mobo not of gigabyte manufacture btw) and that solved all my problems.

Another computer I built from scratch had a huge problem because of a PCI graphics card, so I swapped that out for a PCI-e card. I'd recommend installing the OS first with no added cards, just the integrated components, get it running, and then add an expansion card at a time to make sure there aren't any incompatibilities.

[Paul Komski]

The problem still might be that the RAM wasn't compatible with the motherboard. A very good comment. The most subtle differences can have huge consequences.

[Joe Musser]

Well I thought I would post an update. It may have been the ram I wasnt able to find if mine was compatible with the GB board or not, but it is compatible with the new ASUS board I just put in and everything is working fantastic so far, I think I had an issue right from the beginning cause it seems to work a lot better than it had before, either way I have XP in now and am very pleased, i will load 7 in the morning since i want to run a daul boot setup (mostly because my son and I have a lot of games that just work better with XP) then I will start setting up my Raid array, then I want to play with Puppy and explore all that. So thats where I am with the beast. Thanks all who helped me out I hope to be able to return the favor one day, if any of you are car nuts ask away I am much more confident in that area lol
J M

[Paul Komski]

We always think it nice and useful when people reply with whatever result; good or bad. Thanks.