goodbye p3-733
after seven and a half good years, it's time to say good-bye to my p3-733.
the symptoms showed early last week. my friend accidentally kicked my box and it reset. How odd. maybe something went loose.
but it kept running well, so, scrap that thought.
a day or two after the incidient, i added a 128mb stick of ram to bump up the workspace numbers to 650mb. however, lazy me left the tower lying down like a desktop. i thought, hey, there shouldn't be anything wrong letting my tower lie down like this. i left it like that for three days running and downloading.
and then one faithful morning, it wouldn't allow me to get into m$ windows xp. i have sp2, btw. at first, i thought that it was a virus. a virus? impossible! i had a whole slew of applications and firewalls to detect known and heuristically detect threats. but, as a security person, i only know that i'm just lying to myself. hehe. the most secure system is one that is locked up in a safe box and thrown in the middle of the pacific ocean. atlantic, if you're from the west. a virus, after a few seconds of reflection, became possible. it was just discomforting that the last virus that ruined my life was when i was in grade school. exactly ten years ago.
so, i tried getting into safe mode. voila! i got in. and ran some antivirus tests. at the middle of the tests, the computer just restarted!
figuring it was now a real virus, i tried again. but now, even before i get to load my os, the computer kept restarting itself.
bless msi for their DLED. they are the blinking lights which tell you what part of the boot sequence they are initiating at the moment. so even if you don't have any output on your monitor, the DLED will show you the way.
so, with a pre-os hang-up, it no longer had to get into my os to hang! i also tried smelling the insides, nope, there was nothing cooking.
i think it's a hardware failure.
so i started taking stuff out.
i took out my dial-up modem. since it was there for aesthetic and sentimental purposes only. no luck.
i took out my extra network interface card. still no luck.
i changed the cmos battery. for a while, i thought i had solved the problem... and true enough, it was for a while.
i took out the optical disks. nope.
i took out the new ram. i didn't think it would be the culprit. but if the three sticks ( i had two 256 kingston sticks and the new one was a 128 twinmos stick) weren't compatible, it should have said so from bootup of day one's ram surgery. so i played around by leaving only one of the
three sticks in rotation. no good
i bought a new and branded power supply from pcx (curse you, villman!). it turns out my Php750 (or $13-$15) investment wasn't needed at all.
and finally, i got to the hardest part. the only thing that i was in denial of from the start. the hard disks. the hard disks couldn't be dead! no! that was 120 gb of data (excluding os files)! i just finished organizing them and renaming them for backup and guess what! no, they couldn't be broken. losing the 40gb disk was alright. man, ibm hard disks are tough. this disk is around 6 years old. my oldest hd alive is a 4gb ibm hd. and i can't remember how old it is. hehehe. it's even 5400rpm. it was only worth 15gb of download. a good two weeks worth ONLY. but if i lost my bigger hard drive (which i call batman), i'd be devastated.
so, at first i took them out. ang guess the freaking what! there were ant eggs! yes, ant eggs! the little white ones on the hard disk!crap! this is the second time this has happened to me. although i was able to recover the first time, the first time didn't make my computer reboot like crazy. i
dusted them out and waited a few days for them to "hatch" and get out my virtual real estate.
after a few days no luck.
i tried booting with robin - he's the 40gb ibm workhorse drive. no luck.
and i didn't want to try batman because he's just about data.
without the hard disks, i plugged in linux live cds into my desktop. dsl and knoppix. damn. they worked. could it be the hard drive? could it be? nooooooooooooo!
after a day of playing dota on my laptop, i got ticked and tried to fix my computer's desktop. the fact that batman was still in warranty wasn't enough to console me. my bro's comp
has been out of commission for the past year or so. i plugged in robin... and it worked! i ran some antivirus tests and they finished well! so, my hard disk and software was alive! i plugged in some of my peripherals from p3 - the lan card, ram and of course, batman.
and to my utter delight, it works! i still have to put the hard disks into the proper casing though. i was just so excited to make it run.
the errors that i had on my p3 was a stop error which resulted from paging an out of bound memory location. what caused this, i am still not sure. but like a good CSI, i am on the culprit's tail.
right now, i'm just happy to have my hard disk well and running. but i have a lot to do for next sem so i better organize stuff fast.
my temporary rig:
the symptoms showed early last week. my friend accidentally kicked my box and it reset. How odd. maybe something went loose.
but it kept running well, so, scrap that thought.
a day or two after the incidient, i added a 128mb stick of ram to bump up the workspace numbers to 650mb. however, lazy me left the tower lying down like a desktop. i thought, hey, there shouldn't be anything wrong letting my tower lie down like this. i left it like that for three days running and downloading.
and then one faithful morning, it wouldn't allow me to get into m$ windows xp. i have sp2, btw. at first, i thought that it was a virus. a virus? impossible! i had a whole slew of applications and firewalls to detect known and heuristically detect threats. but, as a security person, i only know that i'm just lying to myself. hehe. the most secure system is one that is locked up in a safe box and thrown in the middle of the pacific ocean. atlantic, if you're from the west. a virus, after a few seconds of reflection, became possible. it was just discomforting that the last virus that ruined my life was when i was in grade school. exactly ten years ago.
so, i tried getting into safe mode. voila! i got in. and ran some antivirus tests. at the middle of the tests, the computer just restarted!
figuring it was now a real virus, i tried again. but now, even before i get to load my os, the computer kept restarting itself.
bless msi for their DLED. they are the blinking lights which tell you what part of the boot sequence they are initiating at the moment. so even if you don't have any output on your monitor, the DLED will show you the way.
so, with a pre-os hang-up, it no longer had to get into my os to hang! i also tried smelling the insides, nope, there was nothing cooking.
i think it's a hardware failure.
so i started taking stuff out.
i took out my dial-up modem. since it was there for aesthetic and sentimental purposes only. no luck.
i took out my extra network interface card. still no luck.
i changed the cmos battery. for a while, i thought i had solved the problem... and true enough, it was for a while.
i took out the optical disks. nope.
i took out the new ram. i didn't think it would be the culprit. but if the three sticks ( i had two 256 kingston sticks and the new one was a 128 twinmos stick) weren't compatible, it should have said so from bootup of day one's ram surgery. so i played around by leaving only one of the
three sticks in rotation. no good
i bought a new and branded power supply from pcx (curse you, villman!). it turns out my Php750 (or $13-$15) investment wasn't needed at all.
and finally, i got to the hardest part. the only thing that i was in denial of from the start. the hard disks. the hard disks couldn't be dead! no! that was 120 gb of data (excluding os files)! i just finished organizing them and renaming them for backup and guess what! no, they couldn't be broken. losing the 40gb disk was alright. man, ibm hard disks are tough. this disk is around 6 years old. my oldest hd alive is a 4gb ibm hd. and i can't remember how old it is. hehehe. it's even 5400rpm. it was only worth 15gb of download. a good two weeks worth ONLY. but if i lost my bigger hard drive (which i call batman), i'd be devastated.
so, at first i took them out. ang guess the freaking what! there were ant eggs! yes, ant eggs! the little white ones on the hard disk!crap! this is the second time this has happened to me. although i was able to recover the first time, the first time didn't make my computer reboot like crazy. i
dusted them out and waited a few days for them to "hatch" and get out my virtual real estate.
after a few days no luck.
i tried booting with robin - he's the 40gb ibm workhorse drive. no luck.
and i didn't want to try batman because he's just about data.
without the hard disks, i plugged in linux live cds into my desktop. dsl and knoppix. damn. they worked. could it be the hard drive? could it be? nooooooooooooo!
after a day of playing dota on my laptop, i got ticked and tried to fix my computer's desktop. the fact that batman was still in warranty wasn't enough to console me. my bro's comp
has been out of commission for the past year or so. i plugged in robin... and it worked! i ran some antivirus tests and they finished well! so, my hard disk and software was alive! i plugged in some of my peripherals from p3 - the lan card, ram and of course, batman.
and to my utter delight, it works! i still have to put the hard disks into the proper casing though. i was just so excited to make it run.
the errors that i had on my p3 was a stop error which resulted from paging an out of bound memory location. what caused this, i am still not sure. but like a good CSI, i am on the culprit's tail.
right now, i'm just happy to have my hard disk well and running. but i have a lot to do for next sem so i better organize stuff fast.
my temporary rig:
posted by Pipboy at 7:02 AM
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