Re: stability problem; Asus M2N-MX mobo AMD 64; etch; is it hardware or software?

[David Brodbeck <brodbd@u.washington.edu>]

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