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Eric's Next Frankenputer


V.T. Eric Layton

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V.T. Eric Layton

Ah... as with much of my 2016, everything turned to poop today when I bench-topped (assembled without a case on the bench for testing) this hex-core mobo and processor. NO POWER UP. :(

 

My friend told me it powered up before he removed it from the case it was in. Unfortunately, between then and now, something went amiss. It's either a processor or mobo issue, but I don't have another processor that I can test the mobo with, except the one on my current main system... and I don't want two toasted cpus. :(

 

I thought about grabbing a cheap used cpu on eBay, but the cheapest AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition is about $200. :th_run-around-smiley: So, the creation of my monster is going to have to wait a while, I guess. :wacko:

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  • 3 weeks later...
V.T. Eric Layton

The RAM made the scram from across the pond in just one week. Ain't that something? Got a stamp on it with the image of the Queen, too. Pretty COOL!

 

Thanks, Erik! I owe you for a few pints, I believe. :)

 

Oh, and nice packing job. ;)

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securitybreach

The RAM made the scram from across the pond in just one week. Ain't that something? Got a stamp on it with the image of the Queen, too. Pretty COOL!

 

Thanks, Erik! I owe you for a few pints, I believe. :)

 

Oh, and nice packing job. ;)

 

Awesome! :thumbsup:

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  • 2 weeks later...
V.T. Eric Layton

I don't think so (about the battery), but who knows. It was still too hot to work out there, Ray, so I've put it off till around December, maybe. I'll go out there and tinker around with it then. I'll keep you posted...

 

~Eric

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  • 2 weeks later...
Cluttermagnet

Far as I know, Fluke doesn't make much junk. Nice score, Eric!

Hope you get that mobo running. That it worked before is a

very good omen. I bet you figure out what is preventing it

from starting...

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  • 2 weeks later...
V.T. Eric Layton

Well, looks like my new Frankenputer project is a NO-GO. I was able to get a known good PSU to benchtop this thing and see if I could at least boot it to BIOS, but no joy. I'm getting one long beep at boot w/ no vid signal out from the vid card. This is a known vid card that came out of my main system, so I know it works. My guess is bad CPU or mobo.

 

Poop happens. :(

 

I guess I'll maybe do some updating (new drives, more RAM, new PSU, etc.) on my old system later this winter, maybe. Or, I'll just keep going as-is till I can run across a mobo/CPU combo worth building on.

 

And them's the updates fer today. :wacko:

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  • 4 weeks later...
V.T. Eric Layton

But wait! There may yet be life here.

 

I was bored this morning, so went out to the shop to piddle around. I got the great idea of inspecting (under magnifying glass and very bright penlight) the PCIe vid socket on the Gigabyte mobo that I've been trying to bring to life in this thread. Well, whaddya' know... there was an overheated spot on one of the contacts (actually turned the blue socket a stained brown color). I could actually see corrosion/crud on this one tiny little contact. So, I got me a pipe cleaner like this one...

 

ed47e8813b31ecc871c279cab2a9dfe8.jpg

 

... and soaked it in alcohol and commenced to scrubbing out the socket.

 

Afterwards, I bench-topped this mobo along with psu, RAM, keyboard, vid card, and monitor and fired it up once again. I got stuff to show up on the screen. YAY! It did a normal boot (one short beep tone on system speaker), but could not find a bootable disk. Of course not; I didn't have one hooked up. ;) I hooked up a SATA DVD player/burner and was able to boot into Porteus from a CD. Using Porteus' system utilities, I could see that all was working fine.

 

Oh, goody! I can build my new system now. Well, no... I can't. For some screwed up reason, I cannot access the BIOS settings using the DEL key. When I press it at start up, the post message says "Entering setup now," then in goes to a blank screen with a flashing cursor... no keyboard action, no nothing... just blink, blink, BLINK, FSCKING BLINK! :smashcomp:

 

So, I go online and ask my pal Google why I "cannot access BIOS with DEL key on GA-890FXA-UD5 mobo?" There are hundreds of answers with no real solutions. Seems this is a common Gigabyte BIOS issue, judging by everyone having this issue on posts from 2010-12 or so (when this mobo first came out). A flash of the BIOS may fix, but cannot access the BIOS to use the Q-flash tool.

 

Dr. Slackerstein is stumped. Maybe need to confer with Igor? :hmm:

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V.T. Eric Layton

Yeah, well... it all comes down to one thing, usually:

 

Having $$$ makes most things in life ever so much easier to deal with.

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V.T. Eric Layton

Yeah, I think I can even install an OS on an hdd. Sadly, though... I REALLY need to get into this BIOS settings to flash to the newest BIOS and also to setup my hi-perf tweaks and overclocking. :(

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V.T. Eric Layton

Made a little progress today. I started installing everything in a case that Amenditman had given me a couple years ago... NICE case, actually. :) Anywho, I have the mobo, cooler, two DVDs (burner and player), three of the four drives (Maxtor 500G, WD 500G, my current Windows drive - a WD 320Gig, and another WD blue 320Gig) that will eventually be in this system, fancy-schmancy card reader/USB port, fans, case speaker, psu (not hooked up yet), etc.

 

Once I get the newest Slackware installed on the primary 500G drive and rsync'd onto the backup 500G drive, I'll then be able to cannibalize ericsbane06 (my current system); I need the vid card and the Windows drive (320G). Then all the customizing of the OS and tweaking the performance (assuming I manage to access BIOS once this is all done) will get performed.

 

With a little luck, I'll have ericsbane07 up and running as my main system in a couple more weeks. We'll see. Ericsbane06 is still a good system. I may add some stuff to it and make it ericsshop03-wifi, as my ol' ericsshop02-wifi (previously ericsbane05) is getting a bit long in tooth. Is all this fancy system nomenclature getting you confused? ;)

 

Well, I'm off to go get my ascii kicked playing a modded version of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. called "Call of Chernobyl." FUN! :w00t:

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V.T. Eric Layton

Alrighty, then...

 

More progress today.

 

1) Finished installing PSU

 

2) Ran all wiring.

 

3) Was able to access BIOS after letting caps run dry overnight on mobo (reset CMOS). However, once I reinstall the battery and reboot, BIOS will not come up... a minor annoyance. I'll get it tweaked and setup, then I won't have to get into it again barring unforeseen issues down the road.

 

4) I solved the 3.7Gig out of 12Gig RAM showing up when I booted up Porteus from a CD. DUH! The Porteus version I was using is 32bit... cannot see beyond 3.7Gig. :teehee:

 

5) I have a bad DVDRAM (the one that came with the case that Amenditman gave me). The door intermittently gets stuck in the closed position. No biggie. I'll salvage the one out of ericsbane06 when the time comes.

 

6) The used 320Gig drive that I was going to use is bad, evidently. Neither BIOS nor fdisk in Porteus sees the drive at all. Swapped PWR cable and SATA cable... no joy. Oh, well. Turns out that you can't rsync ntfs partitions from within Linux, anyway. It won't do sector by sector sync. You need to use something in Windows cygwin or clone, etc.

 

7) Using Gparted in Porteus, I partitioned my 500Gig primary and 500Gig rsync drives exactly the same: 50Gig /, 100Gig /home, 320Gig /gen_storage, 6Gig /swap.

 

8) I installed Slack64 14.2 on /dev/sda (500Gig primary).

 

9) Using Grsync in Porteus, I sycn'd /dev/sda to /dev/sdb.

 

10) I turned everything off, fed the kitties, and came in here and turned this system on to post this. Oh, and I took some pics!

 

It LIVES!!!

 

Tczcud5.jpg

 

Cable management is UGLY just now. It'll get better when I'm finished.

 

6Ih18HW.jpg

 

Partitioning with Porteus/Gparted; temps check in terminal... nice and COOL!

 

Ir3SWly.jpg

 

Of course, I had to refer to my friend GOOGLE for a couple things while working out there today. Ol' ericshop02-wifi helped out with that. :)

 

EyFBzgT.jpg

 

The To-Do List:

 

1) Grab DVD burns of my important files/directories from ericsbane06.

 

2) Copy DVD files/directories onto ericsbane07.

 

3) Set up and customize the new Slack/Xfce installation.

 

4) Remove DVD burner, vid card, 320Gig Windows/Archives drive from ericsbane06 and install in ericsbane07.

 

4.1) Clean up that cable mess!

 

5) Final tweaking of BIOS and OS on ericsbane07.

 

6) FIN! :w00tx100:

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EyFBzgT.jpgNow thats what I would call a cooler fan . Hope you have a bass woofer under the bench for listening to Pantera.

 

Bench looks good but waaayyy to tidy :hysterical: :hysterical:

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V.T. Eric Layton

Yeah, there's a little Logitech sub-woofer under the table. Sound is not too carpy out of that ol' ericsshop02-wifi system; not as good as my Logitech 5.1 in the house, though. ;)

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V.T. Eric Layton

OK, today's progress...

 

Cable management MUCH better now...

 

k39Ra2V.jpg

 

DMQ1T33.jpg

 

Ericsbane07 has been installed in my computer room/office. It's the one on the left desk. The right desk is my office desk. I decided to trim down ericsbane06 and use it at that desk with my ol' 19" HP monitor. I also re-did wiring/cable management under my desks. It sorely needed it. ;)

 

SDGbxXQ.jpg

 

Anywho, ericsbane06 is doing fine. I'm posting from that system now. In a few minutes I will begin the fun of setting up ericsbane07. Once I have networking, Nvidia drivers, sound, etc. working, I'll transfer important files/directories from ericsbane06 via SSH/ftp. Then, more customizing, tweaking, and so forth. FUN!

 

Toodles...

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Was able to access BIOS after letting caps run dry overnight on mobo

I'm hopeless when it comes to hardware, but still would like to know what "letting caps run dry" means. Anyway, I guess you did finally get some breaks with this new system. Congrats!

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I'm hopeless when it comes to hardware, but still would like to know what "letting caps run dry" means.

CMOS needs a trickle of power to hold changes in settings. When you remove the CMOS battery, the CMOS will reset to default settings but a tiny bit of charge remains in the power circuit capacitors which may delay the reset. "letting caps run dry" means leaving the CMOS battery out until the capacitor charge fully drains, thus ensuring the reset.

At least that's what I think Eric means. :)

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V.T. Eric Layton

Yes. That's what I meant. :)

 

Yeesh! I'm tired. I've been at this for two or three days now. Lots left to do on the new system. I think I'm done for the night, though. Going to go take a shower, read a while, watch Perry Mason, and then off to beddy-bye. :)

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V.T. Eric Layton

I thought I was tired yesterday. Today I'm really pooped. I have most everything set up and working in the new system, but there are a few problems:

 

1) Slackware 14.2 now uses PulseAudio as its default sound system. PA SUCKS! I'm using it now, but finding a few things about it that I just don't like. I may switch to ALSA and dump PA.

 

2) I was able to install the newest Chromium on this system. You may remember that I could not install anything beyond v52.x.x on my other system. Well, Chromium is working in this new system, but it is popping up and annoying request to access my gnome keyring server. Very aggravating.

 

3) Some of my imported themes and icons are not caching properly on this system. I have to fix that! I like my custom themes/icons. Tango gets pretty old pretty fast. :(

 

4) I cannot for the life of my (spent 5 hours tonight) get networkmanager-openvpn to configure my vpn networks. I MUST get this working or I'll have to go back to using TOR. :(

 

That's about it for now. I'm sure I'll run across some other bugaboos before I'm done. I haven't yet tried to boot my Windows drive. I'm going to give that a shot as soon as I finish posting this here.

 

I'm off to beddy-bye SOON. I don't think I'll even turn these D***** soul-sucking machines on tomorrow. :teehee:

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V.T. Eric Layton

We're making progress. I just solved a BIG Window issue, so I'm happy about that. Last night after posting my last post above, I tried to boot into my Windows system. Boot failed. Windows fixes did not work. I was actually thinking that my Win 7 freaked out because I put it on new hardware (a licensing no-no for Windows). However, I realized this morning that this is a multi-license commercial Enterprise edition, and hardware changes shouldn't affect it like standard versions of Windows, so...

 

I did a search with my pal Google and found someone on Reddit who was having the exact same problems. He found that the original machine's SATA controller was set to IDE Native, but his new machine was set to AHCI. I checked my BIOS and found that my original machine was AHCI and this new controller was set to IDE Native, so I switched it to AHCI. BOOM! MS 7 boots up, downloads and installs new drivers for the new hardware. And VIOLA! Win 7 is up and running. I installed my Nvidia drivers and am now defragging my NTFS and FAT partitions.

 

My only worry is that switching from IDE Native to AHCI may affect my Linux booting, but I'm hopeful that Slack is tolerant enough to not freak out about that. If it does, though, I can always reinstall the OS... no biggie. It might even solve a couple of the buggies I'm having in Slack right now: NetworkManager not allowing me to set up my VPN and some buggy theme/icon issues.

 

PROGRESS IS A GOOD THING! :w00t:

 

 

 

 

 

 

.

Edited by V.T. Eric Layton
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I switched it to AHCI. BOOM! MS 7 boots up, downloads and installs new drivers for the new hardware. And VIOLA! Win 7 is up and running.

s/viola/voilà/

Viola -

300px-Playing_viola.jpg

 

voilà - http://www.thefreedi...ary.com/voilÃ

 

My only worry is that switching from IDE Native to AHCI may affect my Linux booting,

Been there, done that. Linux handles the change to AHCI fine. Windows needs a registry tweak before you change it in the BIOS or it won't boot.

 

sunrat - fixing things that are wrong on the internet since 2001. ;)

duty_calls.png

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We're making progress. I just solved a BIG Window issue, so I'm happy about that. Last night after posting my last post above, I tried to boot into my Windows system. Boot failed. Windows fixes did not work. I was actually thinking that my Win 7 freaked out because I put it on new hardware (a licensing no-no for Windows). However, I realized this morning that this is a multi-license commercial Enterprise edition, and hardware changes shouldn't affect it like standard versions of Windows, so...

 

PROGRESS IS A GOOD THING! :w00t:

 

Eric, the motherboard in my daughter's WIN7 Home 32bit PC let out the magic smoke (on-board video). Found one on Amazon that was the same model G41, but different make - wanted to use the same RAM and CPU. Mounted the board, after smoke testing, plugged everything back in, booted into BIOS and set the HDD to AHCI and rebooted. Windows booted and went through some gyrations, did some communication with the mother-ship and VIOLÁ! Been working just fine ever since. Windows is wonderful too (most of the time!). Congrats on resurrecting the new rig!

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V.T. Eric Layton

WELL...

 

I've been having issues. I'm tired and aggravated. Challenges like these don't thrill me none in my dotage. I prefer for things to just work. Sadly, this is unusual for Slackware. However, I'm having issues with 14.2 (newest version) that have cost me days of my life trying to get working. I'm at the point where I think one of the issues is actually a bug (NetworkManager).

 

Here's my situation now:

 

--Minor Issues--

 

- fonts rendering badly in the newest chromium (remember I couldn't install this one on my 14.1 Slackware)

- cannot install my themes and icons from 14.1; they install, but do not render properly

- many of my 14.1 Slackbuilds will not work in 14.2 without rebuilding; some aren't even available anymore

- my clock in the main panel (Orage) will not do transparency

 

--MAJOR Issues--

 

- NetworkManager is buggy as H3LL in 14.2; it creates a new connection (wired - eth0) each time I restart it. It also won't let me set up a static connection (for use with ssh). Doesn't play well with openVPN. I cannot get my VPN to work. I've spent the last three days trying to figure this one out. I've read hundreds of links in Google Search to try to resolve this issue. I GIVE UP!

 

So, guess what I'm doing now? That's right! I'm setting up this new Frankenputer with Slackware 14.1. It works like a Timex watch on my older systems, so I figure... what the hey. I need a system that will work. I'll be setting it up shortly. It's already installed.

 

I'll keep yous guys posted...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

.

Edited by V.T. Eric Layton
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V.T. Eric Layton

Oh, and did I mention that Pulse Audio SUCKS! I have my ALSA back now, though. YAY! :)

 

So, here it is folks... finally:

 

ericsbane07 - Built Nov/Dec 2016

 

System:

 

Gigabyte 890FXA-UD5 rev. 2.1

AMD Phenom II 1090 6-core cpu

12 Gig RAM (unganged)

WD Blue 500G SATA III (Slackware64 14.1)

Maxtor 500G SATA II (Slackware64 14.1 rsync backup)

Seagate 320G SATA II (MS Windows 7 Enterprise SP2 + common storage)

IO Magic DVD RW

LiteOn DVD RW

Rosewill Multicard reader and USB 2.0 hub

Antec Continuous Power 750W (modular)

Nvidia GTS-450 vid card

 

---

Peripherals:

 

Samsung 22" LCD monitor (native 1680x1050 resolution)

Logitech 5.1 sound system

Logitech Wave wireless keyboard

Logitech TracMan wireless mouse

HP Envy 5643 All-In-One printer/scanner/fax/copier

 

---

 

Fast Internet and a SATA III drive sure make updating fun! I downloaded and installed three years' worth of Slack 14.1 updates in 10 minutes flat. All's well! No buggies, no runs, no drips, no errors. I'll start transferring my personal and config files over to the new system via ssh/ftp tomorrow or Sunday.

 

Man! What a ride this has been. I'm getting to old for this shirt. ;)

 

Goodnight all...

Edited by V.T. Eric Layton
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