[Tfug] Any tips for diagnosing possible hardware problems?

[Adrian]

On Tuesday 10 October 2006 16:09, Glen Pfeiffer wrote:
> Can anyone offer any assistance on how to diagnose which (if any)
> hardware component is bad? Here is my problem...
[snip]
> I have removed most of the non-essential hardware (floppy, agp video
> card), and still have the same issue. I have also swapped out the hard
> drive as it was suspect. I have checked all the cables, and replaced
> many of them. I have tested the memory in another pc and verified that
> it is alright.
> 
> At this point I am thinking either the motherboard, cpu or possibly the
> CD drive.

Well... First, are you really sure the memory is OK? Memory often dies as bad 
bits scattered across the memory range (which may only happen under sustained 
load). Something like a system install is going to stress the memory, loading 
up with cache. Simply booting a system typically doesn;t unless it severly 
memory starved...

I think you are on the right track. My list of possible problems (in general 
order of likely-hood) would be: HD, memory, IO controller (bad driver or 
hardware), motherboard (bus/etc.), peripheral devices (floppy/video/etc.).

You should be able to switch virtual consoles during the install using 
<alt>+<Fn> or <ctl>+<alt>+<Fn> where n is 1-9. Console 2 is sometimes blank, 
sometimes a debugging output, depending on the distro, on the higher consoles 
(7+ is typically video console) may be tails of dmesg/etc. and one of them 
should be a login console. I would start there and see 1) if the login 
console responds, 2) are there errors apparent in the logs, 3) use the login 
console to dmesg and check various system things.

If you don;t see any errors during the install (ie. bad sector errors/etc.), 
go grab a copy of Memtest86 and run that for an hour or so. There are both CD 
iso and floppy images available.

If you still don;t find an error... I would start to suspect that there is a 
problem with the driver/kernel and the IDE controller driving the HD... Had 
the same problem on my laptop, FC2 and FC3 both had a broken driver for the 
ATI IDE controller... DMA bork'd during install attempts. You can try feeding 
a kernel option to disable DMA when you start the install (when the initial 
syslinux finishes and asks you what mode/options you want to install with, 
ie. linux, text-only, rescue, kernel options, etc.).

Adrian