Re: stability problem; Asus M2N-MX mobo AMD 64; etch; is it hardware or software?

On Jun 25, 2007, at 10:15 AM, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:

> Last one I ran across was a bad agp video card. machine
> wouldn't boot. I assumed it was the mobo cause I put *everything* into
> another mobo and it all booted just fine. The only thing I hadn't
> moved was the video card... the "faulty" board has no onboard video,
> so I guess my brain didn't make the leap. Anyway, it wasn't until
> after I had purchased another mobo which *also* wouldn't boot that I
> finally realised the video card was the common factor and the
> culprit.

I ran into that once, too. Except in my case it was a PCI video card. The machine wouldn't even POST with that card installed. I was sure it was the motherboard, but just to be safe I yanked out the video card and tried it with the on-board video...and it booted. ATI exchanged the card, no questions asked, and the machine has been fine ever since.

I missed the beginning of this thread, but has anyone suggested MEMTEST-86 yet? That's always the first place I go when I have stability problems. Bad RAM is more common than you'd think. I now test all new RAM (and all systems that come with RAM pre-installed) for at least one pass with MEMTEST-86 before putting a machine in service. I even do this when installing known-good RAM into a different machine, because I've run into RAM compatibility issues before.

David Brodbeck
Information Technology Specialist 3
Computational Linguistics
University of Washington

-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@lists.debian.org 
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org