Hello everyone:
I have a system that seems to be cursed like the Diamondback's bullpen.
:-( I was thinking maybe with all the experience and wisdom in this
group, that someone could recommend how I should proceed on this.
I've had a system that's been flaky for a long time and getting flakier
(looking in the system logs revealed a scad of "dazed and confused"
errors, the system wasn't stable at all past a 2.4 kernel, and it had
started to occasionally hang with the beeper on.) I tried replacing the
Soyo KT333 MB with a new one from Abit, one that was compatible so I
could use the same Athlon 2400 processor and DR333 memory. It started
out by having seg faults every time I tried to install Linux, so I took
out the old ram and got a new DR333 memory stick. That improved things
quite a bit, but it would still hang at least once every time I tried to
reinstall Linux. I decided to return the new board and go back to the
Soyo in the meantime.
But when when I moved the CPU and memory to the Soyo, and got it back in
the case, it didn't work right at all! It would tell me I had a bad
bios checksum. I could update the bios, but once I saved the settings
and tried to boot, it would hang hard with a high-pitched squeal out of
the beeper.
The troubleshooting guide at the Soyo website suggested (a) bad power
supply or (b) overheating CPU. So first I tried replacing the
several-years-old 300W supply with a new 400W Antec. That didn't help.
Then I realized I had forgotten to reapply thermal compound to the CPU.
That didn't help either. I replaced the coin cell on the motherboard,
so I wasn't losing my BIOS settings any more. But now it would hang
immediately unless I used the clear-CMOS jumper to reset the BIOS,
allowing me to get back into there.
One complication of this MB is that it allows you to select different
CPU core voltages, RAM voltages, and AGP voltages. There's a default
setting for each but it doesn't say what that default actually is. I
left the RAM and AGP settings alone, because the screen implied that the
default values were the nominal voltages in those cases. But the
default for the CPU had no such guideline. Checking the specs from AMD,
the 2400 is supposed to be either a 1.60 or 1.65 V part, but neither of
those voltages work - it hangs and squeaks again. So I cleared the CMOS
again and checked the "PC health" area of the BIOS, which showed that in
BIOS-setting mode it was running at 1.5 V. I reset the CPU voltage
setting to this value. This time I could get as far as the LILO
selection screen (I hadn't erased the whole disk, just tried to install
into a new partition, so I figured I could still boot into Mandrake 8.)
I still don't know about the CPU temperature, but I know the fan is
running and the CPU core temperature in the PC health section showed it
to be at 75 degrees C, which was 8 degrees hotter than when I added the
thermal compound! This seems a little hot so perhaps it's hitting the
85 degree limit. With all those fans on, I don't know why! Perhaps I
damaged the CPU somehow when moving it back and forth. I know that the
clip on the CPU heat sink is an absolute SOB to get on and off, and it
seems to take an inordinate amount of force to unclip it in particular.
The Soyo manual had no advice whatsoever about this except to "be
careful not to scratch the board" and it took me a while and a couple of
slips to figure out how to unclip it using a screwdriver and needle nose
pliers simultaneously.
Any ideas or recommendations? I've now tried replacing everything
except the drives (though I did try unplugging some of them, didn't
help) and the CPU. Maybe I need to get a new CPU - but only if I also
replace that profoundly evil heat sink.
Thanks in advance for any help you can give me,
Vaughn
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