On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 08:40:31AM -0400, Dave Phillips wrote: > Greetings: > > Interesting stuff. I'm learning more about mobos than I ever wanted to > know. :) > > However: No brown goo on the caps, no bulging components, so I don't > think it's the capacitors. The fact that the machine is dying right at > the start seems to indicate that the problem may be either RAM or the > power supply. I'll check the RAM in another machine within a day or two, > if it's okay then I'll try switching out the power supply. > > What a PITA.
Yep, hardware failures are no fun. I'd guess the RAM too; I had a bad stick several years ago that gave me gradually increasing kernel panics. Stupidly, I had no way to back up everything at the time, only small documents to floppy, and a forced reboot after one panic triggered a fsck on startup during which the system crashed AGAIN rendering the disk unmountable. That was fun I can tell you. I did eventually retrieve all my data after replacing the RAM, but it took about two days of nonstop work. since then I have set myself up with redundant hard drives, occasional CD-RW and DVD-R backups, and journalling filesystems :-) -- Paul Winkler http://www.slinkp.com
