[PLUG] linux issues, identical hardware, one works with linux,the other just with windows. Solar flares?

Karol Kulaga root at loraksus.org
Fri Nov 7 04:40:02 UTC 2003


Thanks for all the help folks. 
Okie dokey. 
Problem solved. 
There is some kind of problem between the video card I was using and my
chipset and every linux usb driver that I tried. 
Switched the video card, had my finger over the power button in preparation
for the inevitable hang and the damn thing worked. 
What? How? No bloody clue. Tried the old video card again, nope, switched to
the other one, yup. Did this a couple of times while the "wtf" in my head
wore off. 
Put in a 7500 Radeon, that worked and then tried a GLINT 500TX card. I
figured a $7000 card should have drivers and it works great as plain vesa at
640x480, I have a bit of work to do, but hopefully I can get the glint
drivers installed without too many problems. Anyways. 

So hardware that conflicts. 
ECS K7s5a pro w/ SiS 735 chipset and 
Matrox MIL2P rev a 
512mb ram. 

Distros tried
Slackware 9.1
Knoppix 
RH shrike
Older knoppix
Gentoo 1.4 for athlon xp 
Whatever is used for the "acronis partition expert" software.

Now, whoever got the "google hacks" book at today's meeting can set me up to
have that come up first in the results when uhci is entered, that would be
cool ;) It was a really great meeting btw. 

Ram was a bit funky too. Memtest86 showed an area ~131mb that went bad the
exact same way ever 20 passes or so of test #5. Since I did have a 286 in
the wee old days where they actually cost over $2000, I suppose I was
overdue for a bad stick.

Other stuff
-----------

-Did you have a good look at the capacitors on the motherboard while you
were in there?  The things are still bulging out all over the place,
causing bizarre problems.
Yeah, they looked ok. No "gunk" near the tops either. I see this so often
too when working on boxes for people. 

-To totally reset the partition information, write zero's to the drive, 
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512

Ok, cool, did. Took bloody long (like 3 hours for a 60gb drive), putting a
task in the background in a console is just so damn cool though ;)





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