ericsbane 07 AKA "That Soul-Sucking Box" - Troubles

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Well, had a HECKUVA time booting up my system this morning. It started fine, initially. After being on for about 5 minutes, it just went CLICK -> DEAD. When I tried to reboot... no Post beeps at all, then 10-15 seconds SHUTDOWN.

 

I've had an intermittent motherboard connection/solder joint for ages with this machine. You've read in other posts here how a skillfully applied WHACK to the side of the case usually gets me going again. Not today, though.

 

It was 48F outside this morning, so this northern room of my house was kinda cool in here today when I first came in and turned on the system. That diff in temp may have fecked around with my bad connection a bit. Anyway, pulled out and reinstalled RAM sticks, same for vid card, and connections to drives, etc. After nearly an hour of futzing with this thing, I finally whacked it into a stable configuration.

 

It booted fine, all's well and working properly now. Weird darn computer feces!

 

Anyway, let's see if it stays up and running throughout the day, and let's see if it gives me boot up issues tomorrow. My next repair solution may require tools...

 

[securitybreach]

Perhaps it's time to install that SSD

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Why? The drives are fine. This is something on the mobo... bad solder joint, bad vid card socket, etc.

[securitybreach]

It sounded like a bad harddrive as you said it wouldn't boot.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

No. Once it died. I  couldn't get BIOS to load, no post beeps, no nothing... just fans.

[securitybreach]

19 minutes ago, V.T. Eric Layton said:

No. Once it died. I  couldn't get BIOS to load, no post beeps, no nothing... just fans.

 

Ah ok

[V.T. Eric Layton]

I've had this intermittent issue for a few years with this machines. It's definitely some sort of bad solder joint or card slot connection. Too intermittent to be the PSU or CPU. Meh... I'll deal with it till I can't deal with it anymore. Once this machine dies, as long as it's not PSU, I can swap much of the innards to my shop system and maybe still have a functioning system. If not, well... then my computering and internetting daze will be over with for a while.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

What a long strange trip it's been, folks!

 

As you may have read here and elsewhere, I finally had to finish off ericsbane07. It was just aggravating me too much lately, and it went beyond my ability to cope the other day. The result was the ericsbane07 has gone to that great computer graveyard out back, which is where most of it was dug up back in 2016 when I built that Frankenputer.

 

Sadly, as a result of the Irish jig dancing this time around, I managed to destroy both my primary hard drives and my backup drives. That means that I lost a lot of data (pics, music, ebooks, etc.) that will never be replaced. Oh well, poop happens from time to time. I have some hard copy backups (DVDs) that may contain a goodly bunch of that stuff. I'll check 'em out tomorrow.

 

So, how am I here tonight? Well, after failing in my attempt to revive ericsshop02 (formerly ericsbane04... PAY ATTENTION NOW!) because it seems to have a mobo issue of some sort and is not salvageable, I found something even more interesting out there... I stumbled upon ericsbane06, which was all bundled up in a blanket and kept safe and warm. It's an old dino, but it works. It's a 'puter I built back in 2013... an old quad core AMD with two 150Gig drives and 8 Gig of RAM. Monster machine 10 years or so ago; today, not so much. However, it WORKS D@MMIT!

 

I installed a fresh Slackware64 14.2 (all I had at the time) and updated it. Tomorrow I may attempt to upgrade to 15. What the heck? I'm not going to do a lot of customization on this machine. I'm just too old and lazy to do that anymore. I'm just going to user it as-is. and hope it stays up and running for while. So, lucky you... you won't have to be missing me now. With any luck, I'll be around for a while longer.

 

And that's my story....

[securitybreach]

Great news Eric

[abarbarian]

On 12/26/2023 at 4:02 AM, V.T. Eric Layton said:

as a result of the Irish jig dancing

 

I'd have liked to have seen that jig. It must have been a barnstorm of destruction to bork all those drives.

[raymac46]

Glad to hear you are still with us. Something from 2013 is going to work just fine with Slackware - or just about any distro for that matter.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

On 12/27/2023 at 6:48 AM, abarbarian said:

I'd have liked to have seen that jig.

 

Actually, it was more like a WWF wrestling match. I was picking up and drop-slamming that tower on the floor in this room first and then three of four more times out on the concrete sidewalk while my neighbors watched and listened in amazement all the feral animal noises I was making along with the horrendous stream of profanity. They eventually closed all their doors and windows and brought the kids and pets inside.

[securitybreach]

I never understood destroying your own stuff.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Well, some updates. This is really some around my elbow to get to my butt stuff...

 

The only Slackware I had was a 14.2 ISO. I wanted to install the newer 15 on this machine. Why not? I was starting from scratch, right? Well, the only way to get access, I thought, to the Internet on this machine with no OS installed was to use Porteus. And that would have worked until I realized that the only access to the Internet that Porteus offers is Lynx. Uh-huh... that Lynx. There was no way I was going to use a command line browser to try to find the right place at Slackware.com to find the right mirror to download an ISO of Slackware 15.

 

OK, so... Plan B: I had a Xubuntu Life CD here that I used when I converted my aunt to Linux a few years ago. I booted that baby and was able to bring up Firefox in a graphic environment and find/download the Slackware 15 ISO. Once I did that, all I had to do is (while still in Xubuntu) burn the ISO to a disk. YAY! Great plan, huh? Well, it almost worked right up the point where I had the blank in the machine and as getting ready to click that "burn" button.

 

A very unexpected notice popped up and said: "This Device is not capable of burning a DVD." It, evidently, is just some LG DVD Reader that I had installed in this machine back then. So, to HADES with it! I just installed the 14.2 that I already had. I figured once I got in in and working, I could easily do an "in situ" upgrade to 15. I've done it like that before. It's an "all command line" thing, but I ain't afraid of no command line.

 

So, got all my nice new partitions. Got my backup of 14.2 done and on the back up drive. All ready to upgrade to 15. Crank up the machine, drop in to single user mode and as root start the process. Off it goes... for about three hours of installing apps and upgrading others. Just at the last wee little end of it, though, another nasty error message came up telling me that there was no longer any space left on my root partition. WHAT? It's 20Gig, man! But yup... all used up. Something either went seriously wrong with my upgrade or Slackware has gotten pretty darned bloated since 14.2.

 

So, that was it. It was late and I was done. I just wiped and reinstalled another fresh 14.2. Why didn't I use the backup? Well, because it somehow or another got fried, too. It's been that kind of a week, I guess. This morning I came in here and started setting up my fresh, clean, and crispy 14.2 installation. I'm gonna' just stick with it. I'm not going to upgrade to 15 until I build a new machine... and Slackware 21 will probably be out by then.

 

I'm also not going to spend a lot of time with fancy customization or any of that stuff on this machine. I'm just basically going to use the Slackware like it's coming out of the box. I'm too old and tired to be piddling with this carp. I just want a machine that I can turn on, get on the Internet for a bit to say hello to friends, pay a few bills, and order some groceries. That's all I need.

 

Oh, and I have no one's email addresses anymore because stupid me didn't have a backup of my contacts from Thunderbird, other than the one on the backup hard drive, which looks as though someone clouted it numerous times with a sledgehammer. So, if you still have my email addy, drop me a line so I can re-collect everyone's email addresses. Thanks. And yes, I've been sorely missing the simpler times of the 1960s this last week or so. I just wanna' be a Luddite and be left it peace. Technology is bad for my blood pressure. ;)

[V.T. Eric Layton]

On 12/27/2023 at 5:07 PM, securitybreach said:

I never understood destroying your own stuff.

 

Yeah, me neither. Other than the data, though, it was no great loss. The machine had issues and they weren't going to get fixed. It taunted me quite a bit lately. I just couldn't take the taunting any more. It had to KILL THE MACHINE! ;)

 

I quit smoking on the 12th of December, so that didn't help my "attitude" much. :(

[securitybreach]

Surprised that you didn't simply use wget to grab the slackware iso:

 

wget https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-iso/slackware-15.0-iso/slackware-15.0-install-dvd.iso

 

Check the md5sum:

 

md5sum slackware-15.0-install-dvd.iso

 

Then use curl to verify it:
 

curl https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-iso/slackware-15.0-iso/slackware-15.0-install-dvd.iso.md5

 

[securitybreach]

I would always rather wget something than use a browser if I have the address. It's just easier and usually faster

 

[V.T. Eric Layton]

I thought about it, but didn't know the addresses to the mirrors or any of that. Besides, that was just too "techie" for me.

 

 

 

.

[securitybreach]

4 minutes ago, V.T. Eric Layton said:

I thought about it, but didn't know the addresses to the mirrors or any of that. Besides, that was just too "techie" for me.

 

 

 

You run one of the geekiest distros out there already.