I tried helping a friend upgrade an old computer that had died. I had parts on a similar level though a bit more powerful. We figured even some simple swaps would necessitate reinstalling XP, but that wouldn't lose all the data.
The hardware decided to be... finicky. Considering my friend built 5 or 6 of her own computers, and I've been doing the same for 15 years (though fewer times), we're not novices to swapping parts and testing compatibilities. After two days by herself and two days more with me, we made progress and narrowed things down to a single problem that keeps happening with some regularity and predictability.
PROBLEM: We are losing all video signal (monitor going blank, light blinking in sleep mode of No Signal Present but plugged in) after POST and any BIOS adjustments, but before we can actually get to anywhere we can do something with the parts:
- hooking the old XP HDD, we get a logical "can't find filesys.sys" error message from Windows when trying to run it from the "something changed and windows may not run normally" text screen, since some hardware had changed. So we put in the XP install CD; it gets into the blue screen, starts loading all drivers in the white line at the bottom, ends with "Now starting Windows" - and loses video signal before it gets to "Welcome to Windows Setup" from which we could choose to Install or Repair. This has been tested at least three times, and it's always at that exact moment that it loses signal. The computer also seems to freeze, as trying to press Enter or R does not start any HDD noises indicating activity.
- she tried instead to take an empty small drive and install Ubuntu so she could at least check the data on the other drives. The install CD couldn't even do a Live CD Install; although we could give a few parameters in a text-only screen, and it gave a progress menu, after it finished installing, it lost video signal and hung, and rebooting without the CD gave a Non-System Disc error. Trying to install on the drive, we lost video signal before the progress bar could finish loading. Again, this was confirmed to happen several times the same way.
- she had a slow HP computer, so she put the small drive there and tried to install Ubuntu - it worked!! So it wasn't the CD being bad. We finish installation, reboot in it, and it works. We put the HDD back in the first machine, and let it boot. We see the Ubuntu loading screen, nice and clean, for five seconds... before video signal loss.
We did flash the bios to the latest one (thanks to an old Win98 boot floppy giving us an A: prompt). It would not seem to be a driver issue, since this all takes place before video drivers kick in - it's always in basic VGA mode.
We are at a complete loss to explain this. Any help for possible explanations would be most welcome. If only to get some form of closure and stop us from blaming voodoo, because this equipment refuses to follow normal scientific procedures... (Test the exact same components in the exact same configurations at two different times and one works, the other doesn't...)
Components:
- MBoard: MSI MS-6570E K7N2 Delta2 series, Nvidia Nforce 2 ultra 400 chipset
- CPU: AMD Barton 2500+, running at 333fsb and 2.75V (from basic 2.70)
- RAM: two sticks of 3200 512MB running at 333fsb, manually set at 8-3-3-3.5 (*)
- Video: Asus GeForce 6200 256MB
- PSU: Antec TruPower 350W
- Random CD-DVD drive, and HDDs that had zero problems before.
(*)We took care of a lot of the first weird problems by realising that the MB was running CPU fsb at 200 and RAM at 166. Putting everything at 200 made the computer simply not POST at all - fans running, no beep, nothing at all. (It would also do that whenever two or three sticks of ram were inserted, but would be happy with one stick - but which one it would accept seemed to be a matter of the computer's mood...) Getting everything at 333 made it run, but adding any other stick would get the low beeps of "badly seated ram stick" error. So I relaxed timings to this level and it finally had no problem with two specific sticks running in dual memory mode. It refuses two sticks in single memory mode, or three sticks in all modules possible, yet has run happily at some point in the past 48 hours with any one of the three sticks by itself, meaning that it's not a case of a memory stick being broken or not recognised at all. This is only the tip of the iceberg of weird behaviour; I could go on at major lengths.
The hardware decided to be... finicky. Considering my friend built 5 or 6 of her own computers, and I've been doing the same for 15 years (though fewer times), we're not novices to swapping parts and testing compatibilities. After two days by herself and two days more with me, we made progress and narrowed things down to a single problem that keeps happening with some regularity and predictability.
PROBLEM: We are losing all video signal (monitor going blank, light blinking in sleep mode of No Signal Present but plugged in) after POST and any BIOS adjustments, but before we can actually get to anywhere we can do something with the parts:
- hooking the old XP HDD, we get a logical "can't find filesys.sys" error message from Windows when trying to run it from the "something changed and windows may not run normally" text screen, since some hardware had changed. So we put in the XP install CD; it gets into the blue screen, starts loading all drivers in the white line at the bottom, ends with "Now starting Windows" - and loses video signal before it gets to "Welcome to Windows Setup" from which we could choose to Install or Repair. This has been tested at least three times, and it's always at that exact moment that it loses signal. The computer also seems to freeze, as trying to press Enter or R does not start any HDD noises indicating activity.
- she tried instead to take an empty small drive and install Ubuntu so she could at least check the data on the other drives. The install CD couldn't even do a Live CD Install; although we could give a few parameters in a text-only screen, and it gave a progress menu, after it finished installing, it lost video signal and hung, and rebooting without the CD gave a Non-System Disc error. Trying to install on the drive, we lost video signal before the progress bar could finish loading. Again, this was confirmed to happen several times the same way.
- she had a slow HP computer, so she put the small drive there and tried to install Ubuntu - it worked!! So it wasn't the CD being bad. We finish installation, reboot in it, and it works. We put the HDD back in the first machine, and let it boot. We see the Ubuntu loading screen, nice and clean, for five seconds... before video signal loss.
We did flash the bios to the latest one (thanks to an old Win98 boot floppy giving us an A: prompt). It would not seem to be a driver issue, since this all takes place before video drivers kick in - it's always in basic VGA mode.
We are at a complete loss to explain this. Any help for possible explanations would be most welcome. If only to get some form of closure and stop us from blaming voodoo, because this equipment refuses to follow normal scientific procedures... (Test the exact same components in the exact same configurations at two different times and one works, the other doesn't...)
Components:
- MBoard: MSI MS-6570E K7N2 Delta2 series, Nvidia Nforce 2 ultra 400 chipset
- CPU: AMD Barton 2500+, running at 333fsb and 2.75V (from basic 2.70)
- RAM: two sticks of 3200 512MB running at 333fsb, manually set at 8-3-3-3.5 (*)
- Video: Asus GeForce 6200 256MB
- PSU: Antec TruPower 350W
- Random CD-DVD drive, and HDDs that had zero problems before.
(*)We took care of a lot of the first weird problems by realising that the MB was running CPU fsb at 200 and RAM at 166. Putting everything at 200 made the computer simply not POST at all - fans running, no beep, nothing at all. (It would also do that whenever two or three sticks of ram were inserted, but would be happy with one stick - but which one it would accept seemed to be a matter of the computer's mood...) Getting everything at 333 made it run, but adding any other stick would get the low beeps of "badly seated ram stick" error. So I relaxed timings to this level and it finally had no problem with two specific sticks running in dual memory mode. It refuses two sticks in single memory mode, or three sticks in all modules possible, yet has run happily at some point in the past 48 hours with any one of the three sticks by itself, meaning that it's not a case of a memory stick being broken or not recognised at all. This is only the tip of the iceberg of weird behaviour; I could go on at major lengths.
