Ayarane Project

First off, thanks to seraphzero, dvboard and pigeonguided as usual for stepping up in response to the bumps and burps of getting Yggdrasil running. I’ve not cracked him open again since yesterday, though.

Before I go on, I’ll tell the story of the potential problem components.
– The CPU/mobo (Athlon 64 X2 4200+ on a Gigabyte GA-M51GM-S2G) were inherited from brendala‘s machine (Synergy) that I’d built for her in late ’06.
– In late ’08, I boosted Blastoise to 4GB RAM (in the form of 4 1GB Crucial-brand sticks) and fed my old Patriot-brand 2GB sticks to Synergy since both machines have comparable motherboards and can use the same exact RAM specification (in this case, DDR2-667) since they refused to play nice with the newer Crucial sticks.
– Earlier this year, there was a panic button situation in which her machine stopped POSTing, which ended up with me rebuilding her machine (save for the HDD/optical drives). Ultimately the culprit was the 7600GT, which had blown (its caps were split open and some dust was coming out), but Bren DID get a sweet upgrade out of it AND she got 99% of her data back (minus her wallpaper).

Because in the rebuild process I replaced the CPU/Mobo/RAM, I pocketed the orignal gear, assuming that they were still functional. My bad. >_>;

Here’s what Yggdrasil does when I turn him on:

– Lights turn on
– CPU and case fans spin up
– DVD drive blinks and murmurs like any other
– …that’s it.

Nothing comes up on screen. Yggdrasil’s case has no speaker wiring, so that’s not an option here.

Bad RAM is a possibility (and one I am personally leaning towards, since I encountered this issue shortly after building Tsunami in ’07… and if I recall correctly, seraphzero actually called this as the culprit when Tsunami stopped POSTing). I’ve attempted booting with the monitor cable on the 9500GT and the onboard video (which I believe has the chip for a GeForce 6100) to rule out a bad video card, but considering that neither gives me a POST this is inconclusive. Is it possible that when the 7600GT blew, it took the motherboard with it? There’s no visible evidence of any damage on the motherboard, but I recall neophoenixte having something similar happen awhile back…

It has been suggested I take the mobo out and attempt an out-of-body boot… unfortunately, cable reach and a couple of other environmental things make this a not-viable option. I only wish I had access to a proper repair station with as little carpet as possible. Blah. At the very least I’ll be picking up a RAM tester, though it kinda bothers me that those things are still necessary. I know there’s no such thing as perfectly manufactured hardware but you would think that we had refined parts production by now to where we would have extremely low first-use failure rates.

Tl;dr version: Yoshi is a bonehead for using inherited hardware without making sure it was actually functional. Woohoo!

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In other geek news… Remember nearly 10 years ago, when there was this badass TV channel called TechTV? And then it got bought and literally EATEN by G4 and, like, over half the TechTV overlords either jumped ship or in some cases even fled to Canada? Welp, certainly this is old news to a lot of the nerds among us, but I am Across’ resident party late-comer in many things. Enter TWiT.tv and it’s pretty much a happy reunion with most of our old TechTV overlords (along with several new people) in weekly podcast form and they have a live video feed which is every bit as amusing, if not moreso, than the old TV channel. :3

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Holy crap this room is freezing. Which is… a good thing, really. I hate summer, so I am happy to have the stupidly hot weather go, even if you’ll soon see me bitch about cold rooms.

Better still, it looks like I may actually be able to shower today without putting my shower plumbing in danger. And this will enable me to get out of the house and deposit my VPI checks. Mother has even suggested a Fry’s raid to scope out replacement parts for Iggy, but I would much rather do it via Amazon (because free shipping and no sales tax make Yoshi’s wallet happy) even if I have to wait a little bit. :P I may, however, burn this Visa gift card I’ve been sitting on since last December on an IHOP raid since it’s too small to be of any use to me elsewhere.