On Jun 25, 2007, at 10:15 AM, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
Last one I ran across was a bad agp video card. machine wouldn't boot. I assumed it was the mobo cause I put *everything* into another mobo and it all booted just fine. The only thing I hadn't moved was the video card... the "faulty" board has no onboard video, so I guess my brain didn't make the leap. Anyway, it wasn't until after I had purchased another mobo which *also* wouldn't boot that I finally realised the video card was the common factor and the culprit.
I ran into that once, too. Except in my case it was a PCI video card. The machine wouldn't even POST with that card installed. I was sure it was the motherboard, but just to be safe I yanked out the video card and tried it with the on-board video...and it booted. ATI exchanged the card, no questions asked, and the machine has been fine ever since.
I missed the beginning of this thread, but has anyone suggested MEMTEST-86 yet? That's always the first place I go when I have stability problems. Bad RAM is more common than you'd think. I now test all new RAM (and all systems that come with RAM pre-installed) for at least one pass with MEMTEST-86 before putting a machine in service. I even do this when installing known-good RAM into a different machine, because I've run into RAM compatibility issues before.
David Brodbeck Information Technology Specialist 3 Computational Linguistics University of Washington
