Ville Herva wrote in part:
>
> After successfully running linux for months my friend decided to boot to
> Win98 (for a game). He ended up reinstalling the drivers for SoundBlaster
> Live! and in the successive boot, the box completely died. He had to flick
> the switch (full-blown power cycle), and after that the box never woke up.
>
> The fans run and the harddisks come alive, but nothing else happens. No
> signal from video card. All the warning leds are on, and box does not
> beep as it normally does when booting.
>
> He tried taking out all the PCI cards (even video as the last resort) and
> harddisks. No help. He also tried resetting the CMOS. The mobo manual
> suggests bad CPU, but it doesn't seem all that likely? The CPU seems firmly seated.
>
> Has anybody any other ideas?
>
> This is KT7 (686a), 128MB ram, 800 Duron, SB Live, NVidia Geforce2 MX.
Bad CPU is certainly a possibility -- poor cooling is more likely,
especially a lack of thermal grease or a cocked heatsink. The K7
doesn't have a thermal trip and will fry itself if overheated.
What most likely happened here is the CPU overheated under MS-Win98.
It doesn't have idle-at-HLT and does busyloops. This keeps the CPU
at around 70% of max load. Linux idles at HLT and stays cool (<10%).
Even doing a kernel compile only loads the CPU to about 75% and only
for 3 minutes. Most everything else is much less, even (especially)
distro installs. Unless he was running something continuously under
Linux, it's unlikely his CPU got hot.
-- Robert author `cpuburn` http://users.ev1.net/~redelm
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