Continuing maintenance and upgrades

[unixronin]

lake, the replacement for Goose's pond, is now memtesting with 512MB of RAM.  The Dell BIOS upgrade lied; it does NOT, as claimed in the release notes, increase maximum system memory to 1GB.  It does, however, increase memory handling to 512MB per slot; it's just that if you have one 512MB module installed, that's your lot.  But 512MB of working PC133 and a spare 256MB PC133 module that's actually the correct speed for mabolgamp¹ is better than 256MB of working PC133, and one 512MB PC133 module is substantially cheaper than two 256MB modules.  Currently it's 14% into pass 2 with no errors.  I figure I'll give it three full passes before I declare it good.

babylon5 still will not boot from SATA even indirectly via a bootloader on a SCSI or PATA disk, because at the time the bootloader runs, the SATA disks are not visible, period, to anything on the system.  But I do have it running off a PATA disk that's in a lot better shape than the last remaining SCSI disk of what was once a three-way mirror, although for as-yet-unknown reasons I can't make lilo work off the PATA disk.  This may be because of a BIOS addressing mode mismatch, but I don't think the A7V333's BIOS — although it's the latest least ancient stable release — even lets me see the addressing mode being used for PATA disks, let alone set it.  So for now I still need the SCSI disk's boot sector, and as long as it lives I'm keeping the two Slackware partitions (/dev/hda1 and /dev/sda1) synchronized with rsync just in case the PATA disk dies unexpectedly before the SCSI disk does.  I think I may be able to make grub work off the PATA disk, but I'm not going to get into that right now.  It can wait until I get a working Gentoo install onto /dev/hda2.

On to whitestar, which now has a working hard disk and 768MB of correct PC2100 RAM, instead of 256MB of soldered-on PC2100 and 256MB of PC2700.  There may still be a problem; it froze at 09:28 elapsed, 17% into memtest86+ pass 1, at moving random-pattern inversions.  This is rather far from reassuring; however, I do note that it has hung in memtest86 before while working quite well enough to compile a kernel, and the Gentoo minimal install CD DOES package an old version of memtest86+ (v1.65; the current version is v2.11).  We'll see; installing Gentoo now.

[1]  However, I do need to make sure mabolgamp's motherboard and BIOS can handle 256MB modules.  It should be able to, but you can always get surprised.

Comments

[glitch25.livejournal.com]

And I thought *I* was the only one that kept around museum pieces. :-D

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

You think any of those are museum pieces, you should see pond (or llioness, which was recently consigned to the graveyard).

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

If you keep making jokes about my machines (and really, you should have mentioned all the previous llionesses too) and I'll make jokes about keeping museum pieces.

(GAH! I need a job so you've got money so you won't be so aggravated.)

[vetpsychwars.livejournal.com]

Geeze, dude, your computer yammering is just as bad as my trumpet yammering!