Hardware wars

[unixronin]

cymrullewes' game box, mabolgamp, quit working a few weeks ago.  She thought it was overheating.  It was fairly apparent that wasn't the problem.

Actually, mabolgamp has an MSI motherboard, an MS6330 Rev-3, aka K7T Turbo.  About the only thing I like that motherboard for is the diagnostic LED array on it, which enables monitoring the POST if you remove the case side.  The POST wasn't even starting; the DLEDs were showing four reds, which has one documented meaning, CPU failure.  (There's actually two; the other is "complete chipset failure on the motherboard".  That one isn't documented, but I can vouch for it, because that's the way the second MS6330 died.  The original one died of bad capacitors.  Yes, this motherboard is the second replacement.)

Well, I could have sworn I had a spare AthlonXP 1700+ around someplace that I could use to test whether it was the CPU or the board.  I couldn't find it when I went looking for it, though.  All I was able to find was a Duron 650 (ironically, the Duron 650 that was on the original MSI board when I originally got whitestar from koyote).  So I swapped in the Duron, and the machine booted right up.  "Huh," I thought, "failed processor."

The dead processor was an Athlon (Thunderbird) 1200.  A little research turned up that the board would actually support Athlon or Duron processors up to 1.5GHz.  I hunted around some more for the spare AthlonXP 1700+ (which actually runs at 1463MHz), still couldn't find it; asked around to see if anyone I know had a spare, but no joy; eventually, figured out that the XP1700+ I thought we had spare had been in whitestar when UPS destroyed it, and recalled that I'd ended up discarding it as probably damaged.

So I went looking at AthlonXP CPU prices, and decided at length that the best strategy was to buy an uprated CPU for babylon5, then put babylon5's AthlonXP 1800+ into mabolgamp.  I settled on an AtthlonXP 2400+ as being the best price point among CPUs that I could be certain would work on babylon5's Rev-1.1 Asus A7V333 motherboard.  (The Rev-2.0 A7V333s support significantly faster CPUs, up to the fastest AthlonXP processors made, but the Rev-1.1 is more limited.)  CPU arrived, flashed babylon5's BIOS to the latest version, installed the new CPU, and it came right up, no problem.

Then, on to mabolgamp.  It too needed its BIOS updated, which I set out to do first.  This led to several hours of tearing my hair out trying unsuccessfully to get the machine to boot from a FreeDOS 9 floppy, interspersed with efforts to try to get it to see the hard disk when booted from a FreeDOS 9 or FreeDOS 7 CD.  (I want to know why it's apparently never occured to the FreeDOS developers that someone might want to be able to boot a PC from a FreeDOS CD and access the hard disk from it.  You know, as a rescue disk, or; say, to flash new firmware that they'd previously downloaded.)  I became all but certain at one point that the floppy drive wasn't working, so I swapped in a different one, and suddenly that didn't work either.  I was really starting to wonder if the floppy controller on the motherboard was dead, by the time I found the problem.

Finally I realized what was wrong:  "swap floppy drives" was set in the BIOS.  The machine wouldn't boot from the 3.5" floppy because the 3.5" floppy wasn't device 0x00; the 5.25" floppy was.  (Why does this machine have a 5.25" floppy in it?  Old games on floppy discs.  Yes, that old.  Why did we have the drives swapped in the BIOS to make the 5.25" floppy drive 0x00 when it was physically connected as 0x01?  Don't ask me.  I haven't the faintest idea.  I assume there must have been a reason.)

That problem solved, I could flash the BIOS.  (With the latest BIOS, actually, the motherboard supports processors up to an AthlonXP 2200+.)  Performing the physical CPU swap was simple... but I couldn't get the new CPU to come up at the right speed.

Further hair-tearing ensued until I realized that the board was, in fact, detecting the CPU speed correctly ... it's just that while the board supports both PC100 and PC133 RAM, it is populated with PC100, which means the BIOS has to limit the bus speed to 100MHz instead of the 133MHz the CPU really wants.  This slowed the CPU down from its actual 1533MHz to 1150MHz at its 11.5x clock multiplier, and I couldn't simply increase the clock multiplier to make up for the slower bus because the CPU is locked to a maximum 11.5x multiplier.

"Oh, bugger."

Still, it's got a Palomino core at 1150MHz now instead of a Thunderbird core at 1200.  It should be at least comparable.

Comments

[nephthys510.livejournal.com]

blablabla..

The machine wouldn't boot from the 3.5" floppy because the 3.5" floppy wasn't device 0x00; the 5.25" floppy was.

HOLY SHIT!

That woke me up.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

I have some very very old MECC games. *shrug*

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Hopefully they'll be perfectly happy running from drive B. I can't see why they wouldn't.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

What they need is for me to put that 5.25" drive in to a Macintosh or find another Mac emulator for Windows.

[7leaguebootdisk.livejournal.com]

I didn't know Mac's supported 5.25" disks, and the Apple ii/iii is a quite different mechanism.

Coppy it off, run it in an emulator.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I didn't know Mac's supported 5.25" disks

They don't.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

Forgive me for mixing my Apple Computer hardware terms.

These floppies are from old AppleIIes. At this moment in time, I'm not even certain I know where to put my hands on them. Knowing my luck they are back in an open shed in North Carolina.

[7leaguebootdisk.livejournal.com]

Good luck getting the data off of them. I have a feeling there was some way to read them on a Mac(need special hardware), but I don't think you can read them on a PC (I could be wrong).

Aside from a serial line from an apple ii, I don't know how you'd go to a modern box. I suspect there is some other way.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

Eh. One of these days I'll find an Apple IIe as salvage somewhere. There is always the MIT flea market. It should be starting again in a few weeks.

It was a whimsy of mine.

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

I have seen the four solid red LED's come on when power to the processor failed. Sounds like that was not it this time. But it is a bugger to figure out the first time...

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

People look at me funny when I tell them that I avoid x86 hardware like the plague it is, until I point them at the endless stories about it, like this one ...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

While I'm not overly impressed by most PC hardware, I remain unconvinced that the Mac is any better. Working on PCs can be frustrating, but working on Macs can drive me to screaming point. (Plus, frankly, I have always utterly hated several of the design decisions made in MacOS. OSX addresses only some of these. Judging by accounts I've heard, the switch to Intel processors at least helps them out in the performance arena.)

Sun hardware, I like. But Sun is dying by degrees, and current Suns are - IMHO - prohibitively expensive for home use. My biggest Sun, I can't run anyway: too much heat and too much power consumption.

[richspk.livejournal.com]

Yup, same here. I recently got into the Mac world when bratling gave me an old PowerMac G4 Gigabit Ethernet. He thought the CPU was dead and bought a replacement off eBay, but never got around to installing it. So I got the dead Mac with a spare CPU. I plugged in the spare CPU and it fired right up, but after about a week it would start freezing up after an increasingly short time. I tried wiping the disc and re-installing the OS to no avail, and eventually gambled $50 on a used motherboard off eBay. That did the trick, and it turns out the original CPU works fine, too. I've noticed that all the G4 motherboards I've seen (2 Gigabit Ethernet and 1 Quicksilver 2002) have some odd discoloration (almost like a film) that won't come off with alcohol or acetone, and/or bubbles (not near any traces, so far). What really drives me nuts are the rabid Mac fanatics on the G4 mailing list who seek help for various and sundry hardware and software problems, then go off on how the Mac is far superior to the PC because the Mac doesn't suffer problems that were fixed in Windows 5 years ago or more. :P

And why can't you set OS X to launch things with a single-click? Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows all let you do that! And don't get me started on Apples proprietary interfaces, so you can't just plug in any old PCI or AGP card, but have to spend 4 or 5 times as much for Mac-specific versions.

I like my Mac a lot, but I haven't figured out what to do with it yet. Every use I can think of, I can do just fine on the PC that I already have running 24/7, except for Mac Bornes (http://www.timac.org/MacBornes/).

By the way, I've been seeing a car occasionally on 290 with the plate CYMRU5. I think it was a Toyota Highlander. I think it was also a Massachusetts plate, so it's probably not cymrullewes, but I've never encountered any other Cymrus.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Nope, not cymrullewes. She mostly drives the baby-Benz (a C230), sometimes the Intrepid R/T, both of them silver, both of them NH registered.

[richspk.livejournal.com]

I'll keep an eye out for them, then!

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I'm either on Rt 3 or I-495 or Westford Road, if I'm in Massachusetts.