9/20/2006
When Hardware Fights Back
Monday morning my boss asked me if I wanted a new processor for my development machine at the office. I had a Athlon64 3200+ in my system and he asked if a Athlon64 X2 3800+ would be enough. Sure, why not? The package arrived today from, NewEgg.com today and I built up a SMP kernel, ensured my motherboard had a BIOS revision that could handle it and shutdown my box and popped in the new processor and hit the power button. Fans spin up and NADA! Reseat everything… try again. Fans and nothing else. Swap in the old processor. Same results. Connected some LEDs to the JDBG header and found out it’s hanging in Video Initialization. Swapped in a different video card (a PCI card rather then PCI-Express) and the system boots. Left both cards in and lspci sees both cards. Tried to start X and it hung. However it did see the PCI-Express card as I did check the log after a hard reboot. I checked eVGA’s website and sure enough there was a BIOS update. After a painful registration process (the ASP page kept hanging up), I got the BIOS with the instructions to run it from a command prompt. So I created a DOS bootdisk tossed it on there and tried it out. Sure enough, Windows Command Prompt application. So I grabbed a spare HD in the office and installed Windows XP, ran the BIOS update and it detected 1 of my 2 cards as eligible for update and it flashed it. After all this work I tested it yet again, NADA! I’m at a complete loss, only guess is that it’s either the motherboard, the video card, possibly the PSU. Here’s the system specs.
- AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+ or AMD Athlon64 3200+
- MSI K8N Neo4 V2.0 (MS-7125) motherboard
- eVGA NVidia 6200LE w/ 128mb RAM (DVI-I, VGA, S-Video outputs)
- 1GB Dual Channel Dual Sided DDR400 in 512mb sticks for Dual Channel.
- 120gb SATA Seagate 7200.7/7200.9 (can’t remember) HD
If anyone’s got any clues, please share. I’m going to buy a new video card tomorrow to test. But this is the only PCI-Express system at the office so I have nothing else to test in whether it’s the card, the motherboard or PSU.
Filed under: 2 Responses to “When Hardware Fights Back”
Leave a Reply
September 21st, 2006 at 9:49 am
Have you tried from windows the MSI Live Update? I had the same motherboard and an X2 3800+. Heck I even had an eVGA 6600 in it. Close, but maybe that would do it. There where a lot of BIOS’s that couldn’t use the X2 without an update.
September 21st, 2006 at 11:27 am
Haven’t tried the MSI Live Update. But according to MSI’s website I have the latest BIOS revision of 1.B. Would Live Update give me something different?