Thanks for the quick response civil!
>
> Nonstop, eh?
>
Err, ok, I guess I meant "exclusively" although the system does get a LOT of
usage, I do sleep once in a while! ;)
>
> I bet you slowly toasted the on-board electrolytic capacitors so that they
> dried out. Try a bigger case fan to keep it a little cooler inside.
>
I'm sure this couldn't hurt, but the marathon Quake3 sessions that I used to
put this box through under windoze never seemed to cause a problem. Since
replacing the first MB the heaviest workout this thing has seen is running
mozilla, and windoze98 before I installed Mandrake.
> Of course memtest-x86.bin is on the mandrake CD under images/ and you can
dd
> it or rawrite it to floppy and maybe it will boot and test your memory
just
> to be safe.
>
Bootup never makes it to accessing the floppy, not an option.
> What are the dead symptoms? Are fans running or nothing at all? If
nothing
> at all, it can be a shorted cap or other short on the mobo or the power
> supply. If fans run, look for a dead video card or processor or a bad
cap.
>
At powerup, fans are on, power is getting to both hard drives, dvd, and
cdrom. Can't tell if floppy drive has power. Monitor powers up but stays
black most of the time, once in a while will make it to dell splash screen .
Keyboard and mouse both show signs of life, but nothing else.
Indicator lights on back say that the bios, memory, pci/isa bus, and
video card all failed.
>SNIP-
> and after a month of "rest" the dells were supplied with whatever trash
disks
> hardware testing happened to have and they recognized them. Even the
third
> Dell from a different user which died in exactly the same way--no
recognition
> of hard drive was OK after a month off and with a different hdd. How that
> happened is that I took the three back to purchasing and the agent there
> wanted more detail on what was wrong and sent them to hardware testing
after
> a month.
That's strange, noticed something similar the first time I had this problem,
system would boot up after letting it sit powered down for a full day or
two, but would soon go into a self rebooting loop and eventually not boot.
I'm afraid I'm not patient enough to try waiting a month though. lol
> SO you may have that problem... If you have another computer what happens
if
> you swap hard drives between the two?
>
Hard drives are fine, checked that, they are simply not even being accessed
at power up.
> Civileme
> QA Team
>
I guess what I'm looking for is any possible reason why mandrake would put
more stress on my MB than windoze? I can't afford to keep replacing the MB
after the warranty on this thing runs out, and every time I try running
linux on it I end up with MB problems. I'd hate to be stuck in windoze hell
because of this.
One thing that seems like a potential suspect is the power management
feature. I never use this in win98 since it just resulted in a locked up
system, but have been using it in mandrake. (for those occasions when I do
sleep) When my monitor goes into standby mode, the indicator light on the
front is supposed to turn from green to amber, instead it blinks back and
forth between the two. Also I have seen one of the monitors adjustment
screens pop up briefly on a few occasions. Doesn't stay long enough to tell
which one. Is it possible that power management is actually constantly
turning the monitor off and on and so burning up something on the MB? Or am
I just grasping at straws here?
Thanks in advance,
Kelly
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