Mike Kershaw wrote:
All in all you're probably better off time/money/electric consumption
wise just getting a cheap new system, if you have to get a diagnostic
card you're looking at a significant percentage of the cost of just
replacing it.
Thanks, Clyde and Mike, for your suggestions. This is a spare-time
"fun" project, so I was willing to devote some time but not much money
into this problem. It turned out that sequence of beeps meant something
like "CMOS data corrupt" and the problem was the CMOS battery. The CMOS
default is "onboard video" which explains why there was no signal coming
from the external video card when the battery went dead. Tricky part
was resetting that with no video display, but I eventually succeeded and
made sure to write the keystrokes down. Time, a couple of hours.
Money, under $4.
Now the fun part is deciding which distros to try out on it -- I think I
can shoehorn four distros (plus WinXP and separate data partition) onto
its 60 GB HD. I'm most familiar with Mandriva and have no particular
objections to it but think it would be interesting to try some others.
Suggestions welcome, anybody!
Adam
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Jul 1 - Linux High Performance Computing
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