Dreaded Primo PC Rebuild - finally ... [LONG]
Multithreaded
PC woes I've suffered to my primo machine, namely a motherboard fault,
disk drive faults, and culminating with the double bang PSU saga.
Nothing seems obviously damaged, and I've run extensive diagnostics on
the two SATA2 HDDs (passed each time), PATA HDD (failed; replacement
passed twice), RAM (passed twice, many runs on Memtest86+ 4.00), SCSI
HDD with associated HBA card (passed several diagnostics several
times, and Windows _seems_ intact, but see below [3]). I've even
tested the floppy and USB internal card reader; both fine. Sound
initially worked. Apart from installing the thing in another of my PCs
and playing some MP3s, I can't think of a formal test for this.
I didn't test the motherboard explicitly because I couldn't bring to
mind a diagnostic that would do what all the other diagnostics hadn't
already done. [1] I could have checked the graphics card with ATITool
- it's a 6600GT, but simply didn't think of that [2]
I'm not too bothered as I will be ditching the motherboard as I
believe it can no longer be trusted, even if it passes all diagnostics
in another machine. I'll keep the storage drives and case, along with
an ancient but good SCSI CD rewriter: all else will go, to be replaced
by the following:
750W Corsair CMPSU-750TX, single 12 rail;
512MB Asus GTS 250, 2200MHz GDDR3;
4GB (2x2GB) Corsair XMS3 DDR3;
AMD Phenom II X4 945, Deneb Core;
Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P: manual for the latter is at
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/Motherboard/Manual_Model.aspx?ProductID=3010
and lastly, Asus Xonar D2X Ultra Fidelity 7.1 PCI-E soundcard.
I chose the option of a PCI-E audio card, as I feared that having only
two PCI slots might cause an issue; the PCI SCSI card does tend to hog
the limited PCI bandwidth. If one soundcard causes a problem, I can
always switch to the other.
Oh, I have to ditch the PATA DVD rewriter and go all post-modern; I've
got a SATA Samsung DVD rewriter, the only make I could find on Scan's
site that could be adapted to look all lovely and beige, mmm! Fitting
the correct bezel was a real pig, making me curse the lack of a black
case.
Finally down to business. The new motherboard comes with six plus two
SATA ports and two controller chips. [4] Please study the manual
carefully, so you can see my dilemma, if that it be at all. Let's be
clear: I don't want RAID of any sort, so the SATA chip(s) will be
jammed on IDE or Native IDE mode.I'm not sure how to frame the
question clearly; if I did, I would ironically not be making this post
at all. I'm tempted to disable the GSATA-II chip entirely, and connect
the SATA peripherals to the remaining ports as provided by the SB750
Southbridge chip. Is this the best thing to do? Or do I put the
high-speed HDDs on to the two GSATA-II ports and the optical drive on
SATA2_0 on the '750? Or is there some other combination that's better?
I feel a fool. I've never come across a board with so many non-RAID
options. The flexibility is killing me.
Is there anyone else out there running such a weird combination of old
and new hardware?
[1] I'll try Prime95 now.
[2] I'll run that one for about an hour and check for no artifacts.
[3] Running Windows off the SCSI C drive produces weird results now,
after initially working fine just after putting in the new Corsair
PSU. Sound stutters; HDTune reports low disk throughput on all HDDs,
including SCSI; large files take ages to transfer across the LAN -
they should go up at about 8MB/s but instead go at about 0.1. Booting
a Knoppix or OpenSUSE 64 Live DVD produces a completely normally
working system, as does running a Bart's PE or UBCD4Win DVD, though
the sound driver on the latter won't load; not that it does on any of
my PCs, so I assume one of my customisations has created a driver
issue on that DVD.
[4] Please refer to pages 47 and 48 of the manual.
--
Multithreaded.
><(((°>
> OK, this is the natural follow-on from my other threads detailing the
> PC woes I've suffered to my primo machine, namely a motherboard fault,
> disk drive faults, and culminating with the double bang PSU saga.
>
I'm somewhat skeptical of the opinion you were offered here implying that
you can no longer trust any hardware in a PC after that PC's psu has gone
bang.
IMO kit will generally be either dead or OK after such an event.
Most psu's fortunately do die in a fail safe way as they have overvoltage
protection on their outputs.
Nasty psu's don't. They can & will kill kit. Enermax psu's are not in the
nasty category.
Used and working kit is usually in the low section of the bathtub
reliability curve and as such can be more reliable than brand new kit
which may have latent defects just waiting for a place/time/stress event
which will convert these early life weaknesses into "hard" faults.
Multithreaded
wrote:
>I'm somewhat skeptical of the opinion you were offered here implying that
>you can no longer trust any hardware in a PC after that PC's psu has gone
>bang.
>IMO kit will generally be either dead or OK after such an event.
That is what I used to think, actually. It's the strangeness of the
Windows install that makes me think that the mobo has suffered in some
subtle way.
>Most psu's fortunately do die in a fail safe way as they have overvoltage
>protection on their outputs.
>Nasty psu's don't. They can & will kill kit. Enermax psu's are not in the
>nasty category.
Looking at the Enermax's innards, I can see only two points of damage:
a small capacitor is obviously burned out (not bulging; no caps are,
in fact), and some plastic wrapped around a ceramic power resistor is
burnt; the resistor itself looks unharmed. Weird. All this confirms
what you say. Even an onboard fuse looks unharmed.
>Used and working kit is usually in the low section of the bathtub
>reliability curve and as such can be more reliable than brand new kit
>which may have latent defects just waiting for a place/time/stress event
>which will convert these early life weaknesses into "hard" faults.
Which actually makes me wary of the new motherboard; I can't win.
Thanks for the good advice, though - it's what I wanted to hear as I'm
going to use all the old drives, etc. And I've only rarely had an HDD
fail after years of use; usually they fail straightway or after a few
days, in my experience. I have a 100MB drive still going strong, as is
my fist drive I ever bought - a much-used 540MB unit from '94.
I just hope the new board will allow booting off SCSI; I must have
tried SCSI on at least twenty boards over the years - more like
thirty, in fact - and all could allow the boot order to do
floppy-CDROM-SCSI HDD-"normal" HDD, plus USB sticks on the newer
boards. I'm praying my luck's still in, or else its back to fiddling
with GRUB with its Map Drive settings. This PC is the only one in the
house that hasn't got some sort of Linux on it, so I may have to
install a ready made distro (I do somewhat dislike all that I've
tried, much preferring to roll my own version of LFS but not having
the time at the mo) just to get GRUB on to the box. (Someone is now
going to pop up telling me I can have my beloved GRUB without having
the bother of installing a *nix - I would welcome that.)
The dilemma of choosing which SATA ports to use remains. I guess it's
down to plain ol' suck it and see ...
--
Multithreaded.
Jaimie Vandenbergh
wrote:
> (Someone is now
>going to pop up telling me I can have my beloved GRUB without having
>the bother of installing a *nix - I would welcome that.)
I'm quite certain you can do this from pretty much any liveCD - you
can certainly repair a GRUB installation from the Ubuntu
installer/live CD, so there's no reason why you can't install it from
that.
Cheers - Jaimie
--
Cartography:
The fine art of loading cars into ballistas and flinging them into walls
-- http://www.frozenreality.co.uk/comic/bunny/index.php?id=585
Jeff Gaines
Multithreaded wrote:
>The dilemma of choosing which SATA ports to use remains. I guess it's
>down to plain ol' suck it and see ...
I have seen it suggested that the chips on the N-S-E-W bridge (which???)
chip can be faster than those on the 'add on' chip. No idea if it's true
but I tend to use those first.
--
Jeff Gaines Dorset UK
All things being equal, fat people use more soap
Rob Morley
"Jeff Gaines" <jgaines...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> On 16/12/2009 in message <blahi5hob4tb5mm5v...@4ax.com>
> Multithreaded wrote:
>
> >The dilemma of choosing which SATA ports to use remains. I guess
> >it's down to plain ol' suck it and see ...
>
> I have seen it suggested that the chips on the N-S-E-W bridge
> (which???) chip can be faster than those on the 'add on' chip.
>
The southbridge handles I/O, the northbridge handles RAM and graphics
(and connects the CPU to the southbridge).
Rob
"Multithreaded" <m...@privacy.net> wrote:
> Finally down to business. The new motherboard comes with six plus two
> SATA ports and two controller chips. [4] Please study the manual
> carefully, so you can see my dilemma, if that it be at all. Let's be
> clear: I don't want RAID of any sort, so the SATA chip(s) will be
> jammed on IDE or Native IDE mode.I'm not sure how to frame the
> question clearly; if I did, I would ironically not be making this post
> at all. I'm tempted to disable the GSATA-II chip entirely, and connect
> the SATA peripherals to the remaining ports as provided by the SB750
> Southbridge chip. Is this the best thing to do? Or do I put the
> high-speed HDDs on to the two GSATA-II ports and the optical drive on
> SATA2_0 on the '750? Or is there some other combination that's better?
> I feel a fool. I've never come across a board with so many non-RAID
> options. The flexibility is killing me.
It's generally recommended to install the boot drive to the lowest
numbered SATA (lets call it SATA1) port connected to the Southbridge
and any extra hard drives to SATA2, SATA3 etc.
If nothing else, it might make identifying which drive is which, when
you come to change boot order or add/replace drives later.
I always connect optical drives to the highest SATA port on the Southbridge.
If you connect optical drives to an additional onboard controller, it may
not
be possible to boot from them for OS installation etc. - this is sometimes
mentioned in the manual.
Good luck in booting from a SCSI card - I know that can be a bit hit and
miss, so look out for BIOS options which may not be obvious.
HTH,
--
Rob
Multithreaded
<jai...@sometimes.sessile.org> wrote:
>I'm quite certain you can do this from pretty much any liveCD - you
>can certainly repair a GRUB installation from the Ubuntu
>installer/live CD, so there's no reason why you can't install it from
>that.
Hi, Jaimie. I thought that Grub's stage 1 and stage 2 files had to
live somewhere, along with menu.lst. I know there's a Windows version
of GRUB, as well as a DOS one even (I have that on a DOS floppy - it
works well) but I would rather have a Linux GRUB, especially as I will
be building a custom BLFS build on the primo PC anyway.
--
Multithreaded.
Multithreaded
<jgaines...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>I have seen it suggested that the chips on the N-S-E-W bridge (which???)
>chip can be faster than those on the 'add on' chip. No idea if it's true
>but I tend to use those first.
I have settled on a solution based purely on trial and error; it was a
nightmare. See my post below.
--
Multithreaded.
Multithreaded
wrote:
>The southbridge handles I/O, the northbridge handles RAM and graphics
>(and connects the CPU to the southbridge).
Yes, and one SATA chip shares the PCI-E bus with I can't remember
what, the other does not, I think, but am not certain. This is moot,
though; please see my post below. Also, I note with dread that one
SATA controller is made by the much maligned JMicron, along with the
PATA controller, which I had expected. I didn't know JMicron made SATA
controllers. I'm such a greenhorn on new hardware, apparently.
--
Multithreaded.
Jaimie Vandenbergh
wrote:
There's not such a thing as a "linux" or "dos" or "windows" version of
GRUB, just of the installer. GRUB itself runs on the bare metal, no OS
underneath it, and it doesn't matter how you get it there. It can read
its data files from various filesystems.
Cheers - Jaimie
--
"How to Stop the System for Recovery Purposes"
- chapter heading, Sun Microsystems System Administration Guide
Multithreaded
wrote:
>It's generally recommended to install the boot drive to the lowest
>numbered SATA (lets call it SATA1) port connected to the Southbridge
>and any extra hard drives to SATA2, SATA3 etc.
>If nothing else, it might make identifying which drive is which, when
>you come to change boot order or add/replace drives later.
>I always connect optical drives to the highest SATA port on the Southbridge.
>If you connect optical drives to an additional onboard controller, it may
>not
>be possible to boot from them for OS installation etc. - this is sometimes
>mentioned in the manual.
>Good luck in booting from a SCSI card - I know that can be a bit hit and
>miss, so look out for BIOS options which may not be obvious.
I initially put the two SATA HDDs on the JMicron two-port SATA2
controller chip, and the optical drive on the first (or so I thought,
see later) port of the SB750 Southbridge controller. This allowed me
to boot a Linux Live DVD [1] off the DVD drive and see all HDDs,
including the SCSI and PATA ones. Trying to move the SATA HDDs to the
SB750 resulted in their not being seen in the BIOS. Argh! After a hell
of a lot of trial and error, I eventually got all SATA devices on to
the 6 port SB750 (operating in Native IDE mode - I don't like RAID and
cannot implement it in this PC for reasons I won't bore you with; this
saga is long enough as it is). The port numbers, however, were not
what I expected, and I can't work out why - they seem obfuscated. In
non-RAID, non-AHCI mode, the last two ports aren't available, so we
can call the SB750 a four port controller for the purposes of this
post.
I wanted the two SATA HDDs to have the lowest port numbers; this
didn't work. I had to experiment and found that the only thing that
allowed full drive visibility was to make the DVD rewriter port 1 (or
0, as the manual numbers them). At least this way I got the mission
critical HDDs off the JMicron controller. The latter I connected to
the supplied e-SATA bracket; on connecting a couple of spare HDDs to
this external interface resulted in the BIOS seeing all six HDDs.
Hooray!
I checked that I could still boot from floppy; yes - no probs there. I
then booted the latest Knoppix DVD - from the DVD rewriter, obviously.
Again, success. Doing an lspci showed that even the new wireless PCI-E
NIC was recognised, along with the funky new PCI-E soundcard. Sound
played OK, too, as did network access and the internet.
All good so far. But then I discovered something very worrying. I
couldn't fdisk to my SCSI HDD, which contains the XP operating system
so is absolutely mission-critical. Doing an lsmod showed that the
Adaptec SCSI module was loaded. I can do fdisk /dev/sda to fdisk
/dev/sde but no /dev/sdf; also, I was expecting the SCSI disk to be
/dev/sda - it is in every Linux build I've ever done since 2002.
Maybe all is not lost, though. OpenSUSE AMD64 Live DVD did see my
Windows-C partition, although I didn't think of doing an fdisk. I'll
try that next, along with trying a Windows XP environment in the form
of my UBCD4Win DVD. All this, and I haven't even dreamed of actually
just letting the PC to try and boot from hard disk (yes, I've taken
care to set the boot order in the BIOS so that the SCSI HDD is the
first fixed disk to be tried).
I suspect there'll be tears before bedtime.
[1] OpenSUSE AMD64, latest version.
--
Multithreaded.
Multithreaded
<jai...@sometimes.sessile.org> wrote:
>There's not such a thing as a "linux" or "dos" or "windows" version of
>GRUB, just of the installer. GRUB itself runs on the bare metal, no OS
>underneath it, and it doesn't matter how you get it there. It can read
>its data files from various filesystems.
Yes, I realise this. I just find it cosmetically more acceptable to
run GRUB from Linux. Luckily, I don't need the latter just yet as the
Windows XP install on my SCSI HDD booted straight away without
problems. I just have to install all the new drivers and test for poor
HDD throughput, stuttering sound and slow ethernet performance that
plagued the PC under the old, possibly zapped, motherboard. Then I
will start building an LFS system, so I can enjoy the super fast
compiles I hopefully will get, even if only one core will be involved.
--
Multithreaded.
Mike Tomlinson
<m...@privacy.net> writes
>Hi, Jaimie. I thought that Grub's stage 1 and stage 2 files had to
>live somewhere, along with menu.lst.
They do. But very easy to install from a live CD - grub-install ('hd0')
will do it. But then with you having SATA and SCSI you have to tell
device.map which drive you want to be hd0, which is where the fun
starts.
The Fedora/CentOS installers always get it wrong on our Proliant servers
and I have to go back in with the rescue CD to alter device.map.
--
(\__/)
(='.'=) Bunny says Windows 7 is Vi$ta reloaded.
(")_(") http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/windows_7.png
Mike Tomlinson
<m...@privacy.net> writes
>I just hope the new board will allow booting off SCSI;
They all do. The BIOS setup on newer boards no longer says "Boot off
SCSI", or gives the option of e.g. "A,C,SCSI".
It's now called something like "Boot from external device", or "Boot
from plug-in card".
Mike Tomlinson
<m...@privacy.net> writes
>All good so far. But then I discovered something very worrying. I
>couldn't fdisk to my SCSI HDD, which contains the XP operating system
>so is absolutely mission-critical. Doing an lsmod showed that the
>Adaptec SCSI module was loaded. I can do fdisk /dev/sda to fdisk
>/dev/sde but no /dev/sdf; also, I was expecting the SCSI disk to be
>/dev/sda - it is in every Linux build I've ever done since 2002.
What does 'cat /proc/scsi/scsi' show?
Does 'sd' appear in lsmod?
Does the SCSI BIOS see the disk at bootup?