houghi wrote:
> Blattus Slafaly wrote:
>> I had problems with some mobos mixing SATA and PATA drives. Bios likes
>> to boot one or the other. OS's don't see both drives. Keep them
>> separate. For instance on a PCChips I have Windoz 2000 on the PATA and
>> OpenSuSE on the SATA. Which I have first in the bios is the one that boots.
>
> I tried it with only a CD trying to run the live CD and turned
> everything else off in the BIOS as wemmas not having it connected in any
> way. Same result.
>

If memory test is ok then motherboard is shot. I'm sure you already
check processor heat sink properly seated with heat sink compound and
other obvious overheating problems and bus controller fan and/or heat
sink. Outside chance could be the power supply acting weird.

--
Claude Hopper ? 3 7/8

houghi wrote:
> Blattus Slafaly wrote:
>> I had problems with some mobos mixing SATA and PATA drives. Bios likes
>> to boot one or the other. OS's don't see both drives. Keep them
>> separate. For instance on a PCChips I have Windoz 2000 on the PATA and
>> OpenSuSE on the SATA. Which I have first in the bios is the one that boots.
>
> I tried it with only a CD trying to run the live CD and turned
> everything else off in the BIOS as wemmas not having it connected in any
> way. Same result.
>
You have pre-compiled bootable .iso Memtest86+ CD?
http://www.memtest.org/

--
Claude Hopper ? 3 7/8

houghi wrote:
>houghi wrote:
>> I even tried different distributions. Sigh. Any pointers are obviously
>> welcome.

>The saga continues. I was able to get as far as starting the minimal
>installation. I was able to select the HD partitioning and what it did
>then was start. It did the formatting and blocked at setting up grub.

>The only thing I can of is that it is either the motherboard or the
>processor that does not do what it is supposed to do. As if it freezes
>after a certain time which then causes the kernel panic. S any idea on
>how to detemine this?

I have no *good* ideas. But if it is truly random, it
could be a crack in the mother board or, more likely,
overheating.

You probably answered this already, but I didn't see the
answer: have you tried a LiveCD of any sort and does it
run?

--
--- Paul J. Gans

houghi wrote:
>J G Miller wrote:
>> On Sat, 30 Aug 2008 14:13:58 +0000, houghi wrote:
>>> Any pointers are obviously welcome.
>>
>> My suggestion would be to disconnect as many peripherals as possible and
>> to try with the latest Knoppix CD if possible.

>Done that and the same result.

>> So on the first try, do not even have the hard disks connected, just
>> try booting up from a CD in a single attached CD/DVD reader with just
>> the video card in the machine (as far as expansion cards are concerned).

>Same result.

>> Then if that works, connect one hard disk and try again.
>>
>> I trust you have checked that the memory is correctly seated?

>Yes. And replaced them in various order.

>> You could also try with just one memory stick in, and then gradually
>> add the others, one by one to see if that causes any trouble.

>Nothing differently.

In that case it starts to look like a motherboard problem. Or
a problem with one of the components on the motherboard.

Has any system ever run successfully with this motherboard?

--
--- Paul J. Gans

Blattus Slafaly wrote:
>houghi wrote:
>> Darn. It isn't working as expected. This is the first time in, well,
>> ever, that the installation does not work. I have several ISOs burned.
>> 32 and 64 bit KDE live, Net 64 bit and DVD 64 bit.
>>
>> There is no real difference between them. The following happens:
>>
>> The bios recognises all drives. CD and DVD player, 2 IDE drives, 2 SATA
>> drives, 2 PCI card IDE drives.
>>
>> When I boot from the HD that I had in my old PC, it boots and gives some
>> error about USB and goes to /bin/sh. I fully expect it not to go to GUI
>> and I would have expected some errors about partitons. However none of
>> that. At least it boots I am just unable to do much with it.
>>
>> The next I tried is booting from disk. It boots anf loads the kernel.
>> After that the screen goes black. I have tried the differnt kernel
>> options and the same thing happens.
>>
>> I then tried textmode and the first time it hung with some sata driver,
>> so I dsabled sata. Then it hung with USB and that is when I noticed the
>> time and called it a day.
>>
>> I will try again tolorrow and give lore details about errors. Now I am
>> too tired to think of a solution.
>>

>I had problems with some mobos mixing SATA and PATA drives. Bios likes
>to boot one or the other. OS's don't see both drives. Keep them
>separate. For instance on a PCChips I have Windoz 2000 on the PATA and
>OpenSuSE on the SATA. Which I have first in the bios is the one that boots.

Interesting point. That may be what is wrong with my machine that
won't load 11.0. The DVD drive is PATA, the HD's SATA.

I can test that in several ways.

Thanks for the hint.

--
--- Paul J. Gans

Claude Hopper wrote:
> If memory test is ok then motherboard is shot.

Darn. :-(

> I'm sure you already
> check processor heat sink properly seated with heat sink compound and
> other obvious overheating problems and bus controller fan and/or heat
> sink. Outside chance could be the power supply acting weird.

I will rebuild the PC for the third time and see if there is any change.
It is a complete new machine and I do not have the right parts in my old
machine to do the chane of parts. :-(


houghi
--
Microsoft says, "Where do you want to go today?"
Apple says, "Where do you want to go tomorrow?"
FOSS says, "Are you coming, or what?"

houghi wrote:
> Water cooling. Themerature does vary from 30 when starting to 55 when
> doing some test that worked from ultimatedcd. When the problem arrisez,
> it is avout 40-45 celcius, so not a real issue.

I have a working machine. Sort of. :-D

So what I have done is re-connected everything again, then put the PC on
its side (which is not the way things should be) and then put a hard
blowing fan the size of the case on full speed. The airflow should be
enough to cool down 50 PCs or so.

Then I went ahead again and did a minimal install, which installed
pretty quick. Then an ssh to my provider in the Netherlands and type
this.

I also installed sensors and that gives me normal temperatures of 35 for
the CPU to 51 for one of the graphic cards.

So the next chalange is to start downloading porn, I mean, get the three
screens connected together and install a GUI and see if I am able to
connect all three screens.

Once that works, I will be looking if I can find a problem. My guess now
is that one of the connections was not 100% or that either the north or
south bridge became too hot. If the first, no idea why I did not notice
it the first time I redid it. If the second, I will just put
watercooling on those as well.

Mmm. Come to think of it, it might have been also the videocard. As I
have ones with passive headsinks and I did the trials with the lid open,
perhaps there was not enough airflow to cool them That should be solved
when I connect the 2 14cm, 2 12cm and 2 9or 4 if enough room) fans in
the box. They are extremely silent. The thing I heard when the machine
was connected was the waterpump. :-D

For now it all looks good, although I have no idea what went wrong at
this moment.
--
houghi http://www.houghi.org
My experience with SuSE Linux 9.1

> The businessworld is like prison and M$ made everybody their bitch.

houghi wrote:
> For now it all looks good, although I have no idea what went wrong at
> this moment.

Just started the second installation with full GUI.

That worked, but I was unable to run sax2 to set up the GUI. So I did a
third installation doing just a minimal installation and add the GUI,
like I did the first time.

I did not looked for a solution. I just reinstalled again and see what
would happen. I wanted to re-set my partitions anyway. So it is now
happily downoading several GB again. :-D

I anm thinking about bringing the extra screws they gave me to the
old-metal dealer. That should give me at least back 95% of what I payed
for all and I could even make a profit. It is several tons of them, or
so it seems.

Oh and no success on the GUI.
--
houghi http://www.houghi.org
My experience with SuSE Linux 9.1

> The businessworld is like prison and M$ made everybody their bitch.

On Sat, 30 Aug 2008 22:46:19 +0000, houghi wrote:
> Partitioning is not the issue, as I do not even get there. This happens
> if there are no HDs in there.
Have you tried booting a kernel with all of the ultra safe options
(no apci no dma etc etc)?

Another heretical thought for this newsgroup, have you tried booting up
with a Windoze rescue type cd (Hiren's boot cd or whatever) to see if
you can get any further diagnostic information?

No doubt by now you have checked that your memory sticks are properly
seated and run a memory test program?

And the memory sticks are in the appropriate paired set of slots?

And you have checked all your BIOS settings to check all the settings
and that you are not overclocking or underclocking your CPU and/or
memory?

As has already been stated, one typical cause of intermittent problems is
something overheating and the system cutting out, so you have checked
for this also?

On Sun, 31 Aug 2008 09:31:46 +0000, houghi wrote:
> Come to think of it, it might have been also the videocard. As I
> have ones with passive headsinks and I did the trials with the lid open,
> perhaps there was not enough airflow to cool them
I once had a similar problem during the summer months.

The machine would boot up and everything was fine for about 10 minutes
and then it would just freeze regardless of what one was doing.

I eventually checked the video card and the fan on it was not working
as it should have because of the accumulation of fluff. After giving it
a really good clean with a can of air, the freezing of the system never
occurred again.

The moral of the story was, ensure that the video card as well as
everything else is being adequately cooled.

houghi wrote:
> Oh and no success on the GUI.

Partly success with the GUI. I am able to get both cards configured, but
they won't run at the same time at this moment after trying out for
about 3 minutes. :-D

What I did was `sax -c 0` and `sax -c 1` and with that I could do one
screen on each. Using the thing I normally use `sax2 -c
/usr/share/sax/profile/NVidia_DualHead` did not show the possibilaty to
show two screens.

So I will be trying to do the 1-click-NVidea and see what happens there.

Some extra information:
houghi@pasta:~> df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 20G 3.2G 16G 17% /
/dev/sda3 99M 19M 76M 20% /boot
/dev/sda5 9.9G 151M 9.2G 2% /var/spool
/dev/sda6 9.9G 151M 9.2G 2% /srv
/dev/sda7 418G 202M 397G 1% /home

/dev/sdb2 20G 173M 19G 1% /other
/dev/sdb3 99M 5.6M 89M 6% /other/boot
/dev/sdb4 438G 199M 416G 1% /other/backup

The reason I selected this is for the folowing reason:
/ should be obvious.
/boot Seperate, because I will do it read-only and unmunt it after
booting.
/var/spool
Seperate, because it contains both mail and news and that way I
do not need to restore it after a new installation
/dev/sda6
Seperate because I will not need to restore it after a new
installation
/home Should be obvious. I will also make a /home/everybody so I can
put shared stuff there
/other
Any other installation. Most likely this will be a previous
installation.
/other/boot
Well, DUH!
/other/backup
Backup. Will ne read only.

Some other useless info:
houghi@pasta:~> free
total used free shared buffers
cached
Mem: 8199952 686744 7513208 0 31712
384816
-/+ buffers/cache: 270216 7929736
Swap: 2104432 0 2104432


top - 15:33:53 up 35 min, 7 users, load average: 0.00, 0.03, 0.04
Tasks: 141 total, 1 running, 140 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu0 : 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.7%id, 0.0%wa, 0.3%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu1 : 3.5%us, 0.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 96.1%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu2 : 0.0%us, 0.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.7%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu3 : 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 8199952k total, 687180k used, 7512772k free, 31860k buffers
Swap: 2104432k total, 0k used, 2104432k free, 384816k cached


--
houghi http://www.houghi.org
My experience with SuSE Linux 9.1

> The businessworld is like prison and M$ made everybody their bitch.

J G Miller wrote:
> The moral of the story was, ensure that the video card as well as
> everything else is being adequately cooled.

The videocard doesn't have a fan, so it should be able to work without
one. However I do have two of them, so perhaps one is causing too much
heat for the other.

Either that or one or both of the bridges get too hot. As I now have
GUI, I can monitor it much better. Almost lost two days which I should
have been using with configuring. Oh well.

--
houghi http://www.houghi.org
My experience with SuSE Linux 9.1

> The businessworld is like prison and M$ made everybody their bitch.

houghi wrote:
> So I will be trying to do the 1-click-NVidea and see what happens there.

For reference. If you have two cards, get one card running with `sax2
-c 0` abd/or `sax2 -c 1`
Next use http://opensuse-community.org/nvidia.ymp to install the NVIdia
drivers
Go bax to `init 3` and launch in my case with two cards `sax2 -c 0
/usr/share/sax/profiles/NVidia_multihead`

Now you are able to select Traditional multihead, Cloned multihead and
Xinerama multihead.

Next you open a terminal and become root with `su -`. Run as root
`nvidia-settings`. There you can add the third (or any) screen you
desire.

So I now have three screens. I can even add a fourth screen. And they
are all working. Neato.
--
houghi http://www.houghi.org
My experience with SuSE Linux 9.1

> The businessworld is like prison and M$ made everybody their bitch.

J G Miller wrote:
> On Sat, 30 Aug 2008 22:46:19 +0000, houghi wrote:
>> Partitioning is not the issue, as I do not even get there. This happens
>> if there are no HDs in there.
> Have you tried booting a kernel with all of the ultra safe options
> (no apci no dma etc etc)?

Yes. No results.

> Another heretical thought for this newsgroup, have you tried booting up
> with a Windoze rescue type cd (Hiren's boot cd or whatever) to see if
> you can get any further diagnostic information?

Yes, no results.

> No doubt by now you have checked that your memory sticks are properly
> seated and run a memory test program?

Yes, no results.

> And the memory sticks are in the appropriate paired set of slots?

Yes, changes gave no results.

> And you have checked all your BIOS settings to check all the settings
> and that you are not overclocking or underclocking your CPU and/or
> memory?

Yes, no results.

> As has already been stated, one typical cause of intermittent problems is
> something overheating and the system cutting out, so you have checked
> for this also?

Yes and I saw nothing.

--
houghi http://www.houghi.org
My experience with SuSE Linux 9.1

> The businessworld is like prison and M$ made everybody their bitch.

On Sun, 31 Aug 2008 16:07:21 +0000, houghi wrote:
> Yes and I saw nothing.
But it would appear that you did not do the absolute minimum hardware
test as earlier suggested, and try booting up the machine with only *one*
video card.

J G Miller wrote:
> On Sun, 31 Aug 2008 16:07:21 +0000, houghi wrote:
>> Yes and I saw nothing.
> But it would appear that you did not do the absolute minimum hardware
> test as earlier suggested, and try booting up the machine with only *one*
> video card.

I did that as well later on. But anyway, it works now and I will be
looking what the cause is much later.

--
houghi http://www.houghi.org
My experience with SuSE Linux 9.1

> The businessworld is like prison and M$ made everybody their bitch.

houghi wrote:

> houghi wrote:
>> So I will be trying to do the 1-click-NVidea and see what happens there.
>
> For reference. If you have two cards, get one card running with `sax2
> -c 0` abd/or `sax2 -c 1`
> Next use http://opensuse-community.org/nvidia.ymp to install the NVIdia
> drivers
> Go bax to `init 3` and launch in my case with two cards `sax2 -c 0
> /usr/share/sax/profiles/NVidia_multihead`
>
> Now you are able to select Traditional multihead, Cloned multihead and
> Xinerama multihead.
>
> Next you open a terminal and become root with `su -`. Run as root
> `nvidia-settings`. There you can add the third (or any) screen you
> desire.
>
> So I now have three screens. I can even add a fourth screen. And they
> are all working. Neato.

I've staid out of this thread as I only help if I know what I'm talking
about...usually. But I'm wondering about this point. Since you have just
spent a lot on your spiffy new wonder box and you have lots of screen real
estate and performance is an issue...why not use multiple hard drives to
spread the file system on to get better performance ? I learned long ago
that by spreading the filesystem over multiple drives the system
performance gain can be quite impressive. Though not identical to the gain
made by using raid it has the same effect. So by putting say / on one
drive and /usr on another and /opt on another you will have substantially
better overall I/O performance as multiple operations can/will be performed
simultaneously. Does this make sense or am I just hallucinating again ?

P.S. I'm sure you have plenty to do now and the last thing you need to do
is pay for more hardware. Just wondering who else uses multiple hard
drives for this purpose and what other hackers use this method...

Enjoy your new computer ! Isn't it fun ?

Michael Soibelman wrote:
> I've staid out of this thread as I only help if I know what I'm talking
> about...usually. But I'm wondering about this point. Since you have just
> spent a lot on your spiffy new wonder box and you have lots of screen real
> estate and performance is an issue...why not use multiple hard drives to
> spread the file system on to get better performance ?

Because perfarmance is absolutely no issue.

> I learned long ago
> that by spreading the filesystem over multiple drives the system
> performance gain can be quite impressive. Though not identical to the gain
> made by using raid it has the same effect. So by putting say / on one
> drive and /usr on another and /opt on another you will have substantially
> better overall I/O performance as multiple operations can/will be performed
> simultaneously. Does this make sense or am I just hallucinating again ?

You are correct. However it would mean that I won't have one single
place to put my backups. Also there are better ways to go about it if
this is an issue.

1) Use raid. If you need speed, use raid for speed.
2) Use faster HDs. At least 10.000 RPM and if possible 15.000RPM
3) Depending on what you need it for, add memory and use that.

The latter is what guru (the main openSUSE FTP) has done when 10.0 or
10.1 hit the download. They had enough bandwith to deal with it, but the
disks could not bear the load because the HD's needed to be accessed so
many times for so many people that it slowed down.

So they added enough memory (I believe some 48GB) so that the images
where loaded in memory and things improved enourmously.

I am thinking about putting some stuff in memory. Probably placing a
sort of /tmp there, although I am not sure what to put there.


houghi
--
houghi http://houghi.org http://www.plainfaqs.org/linux/
http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html
>
> Today I went outside. My pupils have never been tinier...

houghi wrote:
>houghi wrote:
>> Water cooling. Themerature does vary from 30 when starting to 55 when
>> doing some test that worked from ultimatedcd. When the problem arrisez,
>> it is avout 40-45 celcius, so not a real issue.

>I have a working machine. Sort of. :-D

>So what I have done is re-connected everything again, then put the PC on
>its side (which is not the way things should be) and then put a hard
>blowing fan the size of the case on full speed. The airflow should be
>enough to cool down 50 PCs or so.

>Then I went ahead again and did a minimal install, which installed
>pretty quick. Then an ssh to my provider in the Netherlands and type
>this.

>I also installed sensors and that gives me normal temperatures of 35 for
>the CPU to 51 for one of the graphic cards.

>So the next chalange is to start downloading porn, I mean, get the three
>screens connected together and install a GUI and see if I am able to
>connect all three screens.

>Once that works, I will be looking if I can find a problem. My guess now
>is that one of the connections was not 100% or that either the north or
>south bridge became too hot. If the first, no idea why I did not notice
>it the first time I redid it. If the second, I will just put
>watercooling on those as well.

>Mmm. Come to think of it, it might have been also the videocard. As I
>have ones with passive headsinks and I did the trials with the lid open,
>perhaps there was not enough airflow to cool them That should be solved
>when I connect the 2 14cm, 2 12cm and 2 9or 4 if enough room) fans in
>the box. They are extremely silent. The thing I heard when the machine
>was connected was the waterpump. :-D

>For now it all looks good, although I have no idea what went wrong at
>this moment.

Congratulations! Several of us suggested overheating because
of the random nature of the crashes.

I suspect now you will have a problem making it crash again.
The God of Improbability is at work... ;-)

--
--- Paul J. Gans