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

[luvcraft]

I'd be more inclined to think power supply at this point, although power supply problems and motherboard problems share a lot of symptoms. If you replace the power supply and it still happens, then it's definitely the motherboard.

[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

[attutle]

Was Zane alone with the machine long enough to cycle power many many times?

Get a Knoppix disk. Disconnect the harddrives, leave only the CD drive.

If it works, you've ruled out problems with the power supply, motherboard, memory, CPU, and CD drive. That would point to the harddrives and/or OS.

If it fails to work, you've narrowed problems to that first group, and will probably have a better set of symptoms to discribe.