Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Update on the simulation/test hardware
Does any one find a reason below why I don't have bad hardware karma?
- I replaced the broken power supply and got a (too thick) CPU fan.
- Then it didn't booted anymore - not even for the first error code on the display on the mainboard, nothing on the VGA display, etc. Plain simply "dead".
- I took it home and sent the mainboard to the seller (some Internet shop in Graz. And queued up for half an hour at the postal office - now I know why no one uses them if possible) to be exchanged because "it was br0ken from the begin".
- They actually accepted it as such and sent a new mainboard (+ cables etc.). I ordered elsewhere (Internet shop in Vienna) a correct CPU fan.
- Both arrived just at the end of my holidays.
- I put all the stuff in - the BIOS was a V1.03 (a newer one - which we wanted to flash - than the one on the broken/old mainboard). Didn't really boot reliable with 8 GB RAM. but it booted with 4 GB RAM. Checked the BIOS again, just be sure: At the begin of August, BIOS V1.04 came out. Downloaded it and tried to flash it. According to the docs there, one needs a DOS boot floppy.
- Alas, the mainboard didn't want to boot from my USB-Stick - neither from the small 1.44 pseudo-floppy (aka "USB floppy") nor from the large partition (aka "USB disk"). For other mainboards, it worked BTW (but I'm almost never booting hardware from an USB stick - we have a portable DVD drive at work and that works for all somewhat recent PCs/BIOSes/....). Making a "native" boot floppy was not possible - either no floppy drive in the (Windows) PC (read: the Win-PC of my colleague at work.
- and my laptop) or Win2000 there (you can't make DOS boot floppies with Win2000 - no "sys a:", no "format /s")
- Downloaded DOS boot floppies and find some fscking floppy and a floppy drive where it actually works.
- Added a floppy to texas.funkfeuer.at. Did it. After various tries with "which boot floppy does actually work." Yes, I know, floppies and drives and combinations thereof were quite robust years ago. But either the hardware is getting bad "("dieing"?) or it's my bad hardware karma or something else.
- Now the thing booted 3 times without any problems with all 8 GB RAM onboard.
