Eitan Bonderover wrote:
Eitan,Dear all,
I recently put together a computer. It's an Athlon 64 3000+ with 512 MB of RAM, an AOpen AK86-L mobo, NEC DVD+/-RW, 160 GB SATA drive and some older ATI graphics card. I've had no end of problems with this system and I'm asking for some advice here mostly because Fedora (FC1 for x86 64) is the only distro that I managed to install successfully.
The first problem I had was that the memory was flaky. This was solved by moving the RAM module to the next slot.
Memtest usually works for a couple of passes but then usually crashes due to an "unexpected interrupt".
Currently I had some issues with the fan, it was rubbing up against some power cables, not good at all. Ever since that Fedora won't boot. It tries to set the hostname and seems to hang.
When I boot knoppix I have issues. It complains about the USB modules but my USB mouse and keyboard seem to work fine. The CD seems to have errors in it (occasionally during the boot process there will be a read error but the boot will continue) when I start up but the same CD has no problems when I run it on my IBM Thinkpad.
In short, the system is unstable. Fedora used to work on it, but had problems (at some point my DVD drive was not autodetected. In fact, there appeared to be no cdrom device at all, which I find very confusing.)
Does anyone have any suggestions as to what to do before I start replacing parts?
Thanks,
Eitan
I strongly recommend you to take this machine to the place where you bought it (or where you bought all the parts). This seems to be a hardware issue.. Ask them to install any OS and run a stress test... (probably they'll install windows and 3dmark or other benchmark tool) .. This way they can find out what is going on... From what you said , I believe you have problems with RAM and maybe temperature of the CPU... And one other problem is possible: motherboard... If the CPU and RAM are OK , probably the motherboard is the guilty part...
But if you want to do some tests , run some CPU intensive apps (like seti@home or distributed.net) and do some heavy disk usage... Try to install and configure lm_sensors.. It allows you to read the temperature of the system.... If the system handles this stress test , then probably it's a problem with fedora (which I dont believe is the case , as your description sounds like a hardware-only problem).
-- Pedro Macedo
