New rig arrived(just an FYI and happiness!)



  • So last thursday while my girlfriend and i were playing with SUSE on an old machine of mine, i decided that i wanted to do a DD on my windows machine to back everything up to a file on another drive. so i load up knoppix STD and boot in, and it can't see either of my drives. so i figure, ok, i'll just reboot and use the default backup utility. Windows refuses to boot. oh no, did i screw something up?

    so i get the suse live install disc that i just finished using on another machine, and it loads and shows me GRUB. i pick "install!" and it gives me a blank screen.

    Damn.

    So i go onto the old machine and download the 64 bit version of the install cd, and burn it. i go back to my main computer, powercycle, and right as i am about to hit the cd eject button... POP, SNAP, CRACKLE, SMOKE! BLUE FLAMES!

    Hell.

    So i replace the PSU with an antec i have laying around. I had an ABIT with uGuru, so it had a little POST display on the motherboard, two 8-digit display. (as in 8.8. was what it could show)

    it's saying 3. .3 and then waiting, and then F. and hanging.

    google it. nothing. rip out ram, VC, and other PCI devices. Nothing. 3 3 F.

     Girlfriend orders me a new compy (i don't have a credit card, but i do have cash) and it's due to arrive on tuesday. we go to sleep, she leaves.

    Now i have this proprietary PSU that came with a buddy's case, when mounted to a normal system, the connector for mains power is on the INSIDE of the case (his case had a 3 prong on the outside that ran a lead to the inside of the case and plugged in there). so i go "what the hell" and plug it in. computer boots! but windows won't load, and i can't get SUSE or knoppix to boot.

    I do the tried and true method of "remove everything and see if you can get past post" I do, and it does. so i put in 1 gig instead of 2, reboot, and BAM, perfect. windows still refuses to boot, so i load SUSE onto another drive i have laying around.

    That's when i hit infinite problems due to ATI cards.

    So sometime around sunday i got sick of dicking with SUSE and i reboot 40 times until windows finally loads up, with 1 gig of ram. I have to turn VM back on, cause i keep it off (i do a lot of audio and gaming, and having VM on makes everything take so much longer)

    hooray i can use it... except.... the PSU is squeaking. not like the fan... the actually solid state components are emitting sound. when i am on desktop, and it's blank, it is sorta quiet... if a window pops up, SQUEALLLLLLLLLLL. if i load a game, i have to turn the volume up to be able to hear anything. but no crashes or anything.

    My conclusion? Voltage regulator on the old board is toast, and it's been relegated to a linux box until which time the motherboard fails completely.

    The new system is currently been reconfigured to have 2 partitions, windows is updating right now (335 MB! WTF!) and once that is done and i verify via sandra and 3dmark that it is up to spec, i shall install Ubuntu on the secondary partition on my main drive. I also got a new 500G drive that i can use for 24 hours before it goes into my girlfriend's desktop, so i am thinking about splitting that drive into 400GB NTFS and 100GB ext3 partitions so that linux has some growing room.

    anyhow if you read all of this, i am sorry. i just wanted to document it somewhere, and thank all of you for all of your help this weekend. you guys rule and i am glad i am a part of this community!



  • Your tales of woe are of help. Just in case my computer goes popcorn on me etc. :)
     



  • Damn, you got some persistence - a hell of a lot more than me.  I'd probably just scavenged the box for parts as soon as I saw the blue flames.  I've done enough hardware/networking to never want to see the insides of a PC again.  It has been so long since I've done hardware, I completely forgot about the remove everything to get past POST.  





  • @lpope187 said:

    Damn, you got some persistence - a hell of a lot more than me.  I'd probably just scavenged the box for parts as soon as I saw the blue flames.  I've done enough hardware/networking to never want to see the insides of a PC again.  It has been so long since I've done hardware, I completely forgot about the remove everything to get past POST.  

    You never install a new video card? A new CPU? Replace a drive? Add memory?



  • Not that often anymore. At home, I don't use my home PCs except for rendering and I've got one for modeling, production and post with a dedicated Linux file server.  I don't game on them cause that's what the Xboxes are for.  With PCs so cheap now, I just buy a new one and phase the oldest box out.  The next purchase will be 64 bit machine and a SAN/NAS device.  Other than plug it in, I shouldn't need crack em open.

    I was a combination tech support / programmer for 4 years at a previous company with about 500 employees.  It took me and another guy two full years to get all the crap hardware out of the place.  At the end of the stint, I spent maybe 1 hour a week on hardware because we set everything up right.   In my new job I'm primarily a developer / system architect.  I've done exactly two hardware things in the past two years - swapped a SCSI card from 1 machine to another and added memory to my laptop.  It is a large company, so we have a whole department dedicated to that stuff.

    Believe me, dealing with crap hardware everyday for two full years including a rats nest of a wiring closet makes me never want to see hardware again.  I'll stick with business processes and software from now on.

     



  • @lpope187 said:

    Not that often anymore. At home, I don't use my home PCs except for rendering and I've got one for modeling, production and post with a dedicated Linux file server.  I don't game on them cause that's what the Xboxes are for.  With PCs so cheap now, I just buy a new one and phase the oldest box out.  The next purchase will be 64 bit machine and a SAN/NAS device.  Other than plug it in, I shouldn't need crack em open.

    I was a combination tech support / programmer for 4 years at a previous company with about 500 employees.  It took me and another guy two full years to get all the crap hardware out of the place.  At the end of the stint, I spent maybe 1 hour a week on hardware because we set everything up right.   In my new job I'm primarily a developer / system architect.  I've done exactly two hardware things in the past two years - swapped a SCSI card from 1 machine to another and added memory to my laptop.  It is a large company, so we have a whole department dedicated to that stuff.

    Believe me, dealing with crap hardware everyday for two full years including a rats nest of a wiring closet makes me never want to see hardware again.  I'll stick with business processes and software from now on.

     

     haha, yah, PCs are a pain in the ass. If you can stomach it, wait it out until intel releases quad core CPUs, and then wait some more until they drop under $200. Then you'll have half a PS3 to do rendering on.

    I just bought the AMD 3800+ x2 AM2... and i gotta say... Damn is this sucker fast. it's two of my old processor, so i'm impressed by it.

    And FYI, i run a legit Windows XP x64 edition, and MS happily ate my registration... even though i had a few people telling me they'd want me to buy a new key. Since i reformatted the drive that held Xp x64 on my old machine and am using it again in this one, i figure it can't complain too much. I was even going to link MS this thread if they balked at my story, and take pictures of the power supply that blew.

    Anyhow, yah i actually went through a lot more headache than i wrote about. the 6 hours i tried to ressurrect it, and the 8 hours of SUSE sax2 BS that i went through, down to wanting to take a mag-light to the computer while it was running because it won't let me put in more than 1 gig of ram, even though all four sticks were verified (by a dual processor mac, i tossed a huge render up on both CPUs to make SURE the ram wasn't erroring out, fastest thing i could think to do to test it)

    That board and windows install lasted 2 clean years with about 1 reboot every 45 days, no registry cleaners, just Avast!; IPCop, Peerguardian, and a gigabit connection to my fileserver which houses everything (so i can keep my wee 80GB boot partition nice and clean!)

    2 years on 1 install... 45 day uptime (usually rebooted to install new Videocard Drivers and the like)

    Not too shabby for a windows box!

     

    PS, as an aside, all the games i've purchased in the last 2 years have been online purchases, except world of warcraft. But i worked for Blizz, and i have a nifty "installer" for WOW that has all the latest patches and junk on a DVD-RW, including burning crusade.

    I'm currently downloading all my games again. I forgot how long it takes 2 gigs to download. :-(



  • I just finished fitting a new PSU (my old one still had a 20pin ATX mobo connector) and a shiny new 400Gb drive.

     Yay.

     Now waiting for 400Gb to format :(  Very slow!



  • @piptheGeek said:

    I just finished fitting a new PSU (my old one still had a 20pin ATX mobo connector) and a shiny new 400Gb drive.

     Yay.

     Now waiting for 400Gb to format :(  Very slow!

    If it's a new drive, it should be factory zeroed, so just quickformat... right?

    No need to run a full format, or anything remotely resembling a low-level.



  • There's never a need to do anything more than a quick format whether or not the drive is zeroed.

    Later on, once the machine is up and running, you can zero out unused space by running cat /dev/zero > delete_me, then deleting the temporary file when you run out of disk space. That's only necessary if you're worried about the cops recovering undeleted files with their mad CSI skills or ReiserFS fucking up a file system check.

     I never do it unless sanitizing a drive BEFORE I get rid of it.
     



  • What's a "rig"?

    Oh these youngsters, with their teenage tech talk! 



  • IIRC, a full format also does a chkdsk before writing the new FAT, whereas a full format just writes the new FAT, certainly for windows at least(your impementation of format may vary).

    Up to you if you consider that worth the extra time or not.
     



  • There's never a need to do anything more than a quick format whether or not the drive is zeroed.

    I got bored and canceled the long format (after I had gone and eaten, come back and it was still going).  I did know that quick format works but grew up in the days when it didn't exist so I still dont quite trust a quick format of an un-formatted drive.  Just me being odd though.

    Up date to my story.

    While tinkering inside the PC fitting the new HD and PSU, I must have knocked the CPU cooler slightly, CPU temps last night were getting on for 85 C.  It is an LGA 775 socket with the nasty push pin standard cooler.  I have pushed it back on, one of the pins made a click and temperatures seem a bit more normal now, but I don't trust this way of fixing on heat sinks.  I am currently considering a cooler that screws to the mobo rather than using the push pins.  (A Zalman CNPS 9500-AT to be exact) but although it looks a good cooler (yes i do overclock my PC) I am slightly concerned about having such a large weight hanging off the mobo.  Has anyone else got any views on this?



  • @piptheGeek said:

    There's never a need to do anything more than a quick format whether or not the drive is zeroed.

    I got bored and canceled the long format (after I had gone and eaten, come back and it was still going).  I did know that quick format works but grew up in the days when it didn't exist so I still dont quite trust a quick format of an un-formatted drive.  Just me being odd though.

    Up date to my story.

    While tinkering inside the PC fitting the new HD and PSU, I must have knocked the CPU cooler slightly, CPU temps last night were getting on for 85 C.  It is an LGA 775 socket with the nasty push pin standard cooler.  I have pushed it back on, one of the pins made a click and temperatures seem a bit more normal now, but I don't trust this way of fixing on heat sinks.  I am currently considering a cooler that screws to the mobo rather than using the push pins.  (A Zalman CNPS 9500-AT to be exact) but although it looks a good cooler (yes i do overclock my PC) I am slightly concerned about having such a large weight hanging off the mobo.  Has anyone else got any views on this?

    Yar, they have ways to use the ATX screws to put risers on them so that you can tie a heatsink on to support the extra weight

    they did, at least. Peltier cooling required it sometimes. :-) I still want to peltier cool a CPU, never gotten around tuit.

    Also, Don't worry about the weight, a good Mobo will have a frame on the back side to support the weight of the heatsink evenly. Check yours and see!


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