Rank: Admiral OCD
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Location: Parallel Universe
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Update: I didn't get my pole waxed. She had to drive cross country a day early because of the weather would be bad if she waited. So we didn't go out for beers and she will be back in May.
However, I did mess with it all last night and all of today. I took it apart, set it on my desk and cleaned everything. I must have restarted the machine like fifty times testing new configurations.
I was able to get Damn Small Linux to run on like everything disabled mode. I ran Fluxubuntu and it froze on the following line:
[ 0.376000] . MP-BIOS bug: 8254 Timer Not Connected to IO-APIC
In other attempts with other distros, I kept hanging after the system looked for the USB devices - but that's just the last line printed before it stopped, may have nothing to do with it.
So I went into the BIOS to see if I could disable APIC. Nope. It runs Phoenix BIOS in like crippled mode. You can set the date, the boot device order and maybe enable and disable onboard devices, but that's it. Forget about overclocking on this board.
So Linux worked, sort of as you saw in an earlier post. I was able to find out that if you added a boot command line like PCI=noapic that some folks could get it to work. In Damn Small Linux, after much fiddling, if I ran PCI=noapic noacpi nolapic, it would run, but I couldn't get the internet connection to work. If I ran Ubuntu with the boot command line Live apic=off acpi=off lapic=off, it would run but I could not do the internets. Never did get Fluxubuntu running.
Puppy Linux 3.01 with the command line Puppy apic=off ran it fine with Xverse selected as the graphical interface. It autodetected the internets after a few clicks of the user-friendly connection app.
Here it is connected to the internets. The machine is on that white cardboard box to the left of the screen. Just the power supply connected to the mobo and one CD drive - no hard drive hooked up. The shell of the machine is to the left of that: So, what have I learned? Don't buy HPs. Don't buy pre-built mass-market machines and always listen to Buzz when he gives advice.
The problem is with the APIC - Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller. I know that APIC lives on the mobo, but Intel's chips also have them. Not sure about AMD's processors, but I think think you would need one in the processor to talk to the one on the mobo. Haven't researched this yet. But I'm back at the problem where I don't know if it's the processor or the mobo giving me the problem.
Since I don't have an extra 939 socket AMD processor or mobo, I can't test one or the other. Worse, if it's the mobo, I have to get another power supply because the 24-pin main connector is missing a pin. That is, one pin and wire is missing and that's just what this mobo wants. I tried hooking up a new power supply, but it didn't like it and I don't have another 24-pin PSU with a missing pin - HP's way of ensuring you buy another comp instead of upgrading when something goes bad. Even a new standard ATX power supply won't fit properly in the case. Form is cut differently.
Unless I can run the same type of boot command with Windows XP MCE, the OS on the HD, I can't use that HD's OS with this machine again. And I can't separate the PSU and the mobo because of that missing pin setup. And since I don't know if it's the CPU or the mobo that's bad, I can't separate either of those. Even then, I have to run them with APIC turned off, which means I can't use the OS on the HD.
So, this machine will either not have a HD and just run off a Puppy Linux Live CD or it will get one of the extra HDs that came from work. Not really an issue on size because the whole distro is less than 70-85 Megabytes. And it has to be Puppy Linux because I can get the internets to work easily with it.
So there you go. The HD from this machine will go into another machine so I can get at the files. I may at a future date return to this machine once I get my hands on some free hardware. Otherwise I think I'm done. Kinda sad fate for a AMD Dual-Core 2.2 Ghz machine, but something is certainly broken. Hate to take it out behind the barn and shoot it. It will have a second life as a Linux machine instead.You should be more like Cantrip.  Twitchy: "I pulled a Cantrip . . ." GivePeaceAChance: "If the Tempest had nipples, I'd pinch that shit." Xylicon: "I'm about to deliver my [Richard] in your face for posting that stupid shit. " WDF?: "He keeps reaming me... night after night... I'm rather sore." GivePeaceAChance: "OMG MY NIPS ARE HARD" llenta: "cantrip, you fail!!!" Filliam H. Muffman: "i'm on top of dick"
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Rank: Admiral OCD
Groups: {pDs} Member, Moderator, News Editor, Newsie
Joined: 5/9/2006
Posts: 3,491
Points: 1,346
Location: Parallel Universe
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Okay, so I went to the Home Depot and purchased two 13" floor tiles for 78 cents each and cut some scrap wood into four pieces of 6.25 inches each. I used Liquid Nails to glue them to each other. The purpose was to make a testing rig that would not burn if one of the components caught fire, hence the floor tiles.
However, the open space makes it easy to add and pull components for testing. So the HP now runs Puppy Linux, with a boot command: Puppy acpi=off, and lives in this rig permanently or until it dies. I'm going to make another floor tile rig to bench test other machines. Though the tile dissipates heat nicely, I added a fan aimed at the HD because it feels too hot to me and on bootup it keeps telling me a HD failure is imminent - which is why it was removed from another machine in the first place to be tossed.
So this rig is now my internets and component testing rig and I'm going to ride it until the wheels fall off. You should be more like Cantrip. Twitchy: "I pulled a Cantrip . . ." GivePeaceAChance: "If the Tempest had nipples, I'd pinch that shit." Xylicon: "I'm about to deliver my [Richard] in your face for posting that stupid shit. " WDF?: "He keeps reaming me... night after night... I'm rather sore." GivePeaceAChance: "OMG MY NIPS ARE HARD" llenta: "cantrip, you fail!!!" Filliam H. Muffman: "i'm on top of dick"
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Rank: Polio Power!
Groups: Registered User, Server Admin
Joined: 11/18/2007
Posts: 631
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Location: $4n74 cruz, c4
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nice, but it doesnt beat this:  MakeSureItsCharcoalGrilled wrote:
yes. please go fuck yoruself and die.
MakeSureItsCharcoalGrilled wrote:
it's ok. all computer components have clearly dotted lines along which you can cut* to make smaller.
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