Zeppo Postmortem

[ossuarian]

A computer I built two years ago with lots of help from you guys (and finally a computer specialist in town) has been dead for a couple of months.  I think I've resolved it to a problem in the motherboard.  I'd like to hear what you think about it, particularly if you think the problem might be with CPU or memory instead.

Comments

[midiamin]

FC's installation media check is a bad data point. It's been known to fail with good CDs in otherwise good drives, and in many cases in a configuration that was able to bypass the media check and install any way. I forget the details, but at least in FC2 through FC4, there were a lot of complaints about this and a couple of boot-time workarounds to get the install to go. This does not however invalidate the observation that your drive has issues when the OS is running, particularly if this drive was known to work fine under this OS install before the other issues cropped up.

Memory can be a pretty easy one to rule in/out. Memtest86 has done well for me. This may not help if you don't have a copy (might be a boot option on the FC5 disk; Gentoo started including it) or a way to write a disc, or if you can't boot much of anything from CD, but I think it's worth mentioning.

To expand on Luvcraft's suggestion, your bios setup utility may have an option to examine the power supply voltages if you don't have access to a spare PS and/or volt meter.