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vakkotaurPasofino is my first linux computer. I haven't used it much in some time (CPU is a C6-200, not exactly high speed nowadays) and was going to use it as a testbed for trying out different operating systems and distributions. But it wasn't booting from the CD right, and was acting generally weird. So, A little troubleshooting was in order.
The CD drive might be flaky, but it might not. I don't know yet. I spent part of last night doing things the hard way. Pulled the cover, pulled a memory stick, tried booting from CD and from HDD, and saw the same errors over and over. Swapped memory sticks. Same thing. Put all memory back. Same thing. Then a realization finally dawned.
The thing would boot from the hard drive, but would blank the screen as X started up. Maybe it was booting fine and I just couldn't see it? Tried pinging it. Yep, there it was. I tried logging into it remotely. Yep, there it was. Things seemed to be behaving. (D'oh, should have tried one of the non-X consoles, too.) So it looks like the video card is flaking out. It bugs me that I didn't check things the easy way first and wound up crawling around swapping hardware that didn't need swapping.
I shut pasofino down and as it was getting late did nothing more. Tonight I get to pull the video card and re-seat it and see if that's all it was. If I'm lucky, it is just a card seating issue and I'll have a working system again. If not, well, maybe a trip to Mankato for a replacement video card will be how I spend part of Saturday. If that's the case, maybe I can get a card like the one I have (only working) so I don't have to fiddle with driver issues. But if not, well, I was going to wipe the system anyway. And then I can see if the problems are over or if the CD drive really is bad.
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no subject
Date: 24 Oct 2003 09:14 (UTC)no subject
Date: 24 Oct 2003 09:26 (UTC)I'll try that, but what makes me suspicious is that this is same monitor the system was installed with, so there shouldn't be any conflicts like that.
Bugger!
Date: 24 Oct 2003 19:15 (UTC)That was it, for the video. And it is a different monitor. I have two 15 inch Compaq monitors and the older one is on my KVM switch now. The newer one wound up connected to Jay's. And it was the newer one that I had used during the initial install and setup.
That still leaves me with a CD drive issue, but now I'm hopefully down to only that. And I do have a spare CD drive, amazingly enough.
Re: Bugger!
Date: 24 Oct 2003 23:39 (UTC)You would think at this stage of plug-and-pray that the monitor should be able to communicate its valid modes to the computer, or at least pass along an invalid status when a bad mode is requested.
But hey, what do I know?
Re: Bugger!
Date: 26 Oct 2003 10:06 (UTC)Re: Bugger!
Date: 27 Oct 2003 13:46 (UTC)This monitor was old when I got it, so I don't expect it to go identifying itself and all like the newer ones. However, the video issue is now the least of my problems. Pasofino, even with a different CD drive, is still acting up when I try Knoppix - though it runs Mandrake 9.0 from HDD fine and will run that way for hours. And that's just pasofino...