Plug n’ pray

So I get an email from Mike on Saturday morning, asking if I want to meet him at the computer show in town that morning. Fast forward 32oz of coffee and 1 hour later and I’m haggling over the price of a new Soyo MB, AMD XP 2000, RAM and an Antec case. See, groove.jpj.net has been rather abused recently. It was a mid-tower case, 4 drives, RAID controller, 300w PS, 4 fans and a P-III 600 coppermine. So, I’d been putting off the migration for awhile now. I simply don’t have the time to be dinking around with hardware these days.

Fast forward 2 hours. I’m driving back to the show to return a 512MB stick of DDR since the new system keeps throwing odd errors, failing to boot more often than not, and other non-specific highly concerning system behavior.

Fast forward another 2 hours. I’m driving back to the show to return the whole MB and get new RAM. The new MB and RAM seem fine, so I pull the drives out of the old case, and throw everything into the new case, toss a fan in front of the RAID set, all seems to be well…

Then the NMI errors start. Yay. I’m currently running the box with only one DIMM to see if I can isolate the problem, but we’ll see. I really don’t want to return another DIMM.

Of course, all of this overshadows the fact that I basically pulled the boot drive from an Intel-based system, dropped it into an AMD-based system — much newer — and it booted without a hitch. I also took the opportunity to compile 2.4.20 with the Promise driver (Promise’s motto: We have all the Linux drivers you need, unless you’re running any distro rev in the last year, but you can always use the i2o_block module. Maybe.”). 2.4.20 had the goods for the newer VIA chipset in this MB, so it was worth it.

So far, with only one stick of RAM, and the bus at 133Mhz, it hasn’t kicked an error, so it’s either a bad DIMM, heat, or both. We shall see, I suppose.