OT: Help on hardware failure

O. Hartmann ohartman at uni-mainz.de
Wed Mar 15 11:10:06 UTC 2006


Hello.
Sorry posting this here, but I hope somebody is capable of helping in
this situation.

Yesterday I tried to insert a Creative Soundblasetr live! (CT4380)
audioboard into a ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe running FreeBSD 6.1-PRE. After
starting the box, everything seems to be ok. I kldloaded snd_emu10k1 and
a sneak view into the dmesg-output shows up the audio boards has been
recognized. I have to mention I disabled the built-in audio codec of the
mainboard.
After starting XINE a recognized the system froze immediately. After
pushing the reset button The only thing I saw was the BIOS message
reporting a count of 2GB memory and the type of CPU (AMD64 3500+). Then
nothing happened anymore. Immediately after a new reset I pushed the DEL
key to enter BIOS setup, I saw the appropriate message at the bottom of
the screen, that BIOS would be entered, then I recognized the screen of
the nVidia RAID, saying RAID is good (I have two 200GB harddrives as
striped RAID 0 configured). Then nothing happened.

After the extraction of the Creative audio board I did a CLEAR CMOS. And
after that, nothing happened anymore, nothing visible on my Flat Panel,
no beep, nothing. i can switch on and off the box by pressing the power
button, and the box gets off power by pressing the power button 4 secs.
The green ATX-power LED indicating power to the board is lighting.

Pulling out one of two 1GB ECC DIMMs forces the board to beep, pulling
out both DIMMs triggers the the same reaction.

The big question is: is the mainboard gone to hell or the CPU? I do not
have any exchange CPU or MoBo to test, so I need to track down the
problem otherwise. Is this possible without additional technical equipment?

The other question is: what happend to the A8N-SLI Deluxe mainboard? The
appropriate audio card works fine in any older system I tested it on. It
is very curious the system dies when activating the sound ports on this
audio board as it happened to me. As I read in some newsgroups about
nForce4 killing sattelite receiver cards by overdriving the voltage
regulators leads me into suspecting the mobo being dead.

Well, any help is appreciated.

Thanks a lot,
Oliver


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list