What can I expect...

[sellis]

Yesterday, my mobo when "pfft!" while I was at work. PSU seems to be OK, but the bare mobo is pulling enough current to pull the 5v line down to 2v. Nasty.

 

(I still don't know if there is any collateral damage; I hope not, given that this is an undervoltage rather than an overvoltage condition. Let's assume that the rest of the system's Ok for now.)

 

I have a new mobo on express order, but it is of course different from the 3-year-old one I had before.

 

So, what can I expect when I plug in and boot (assuming that my hard drive is OK)?

 

Is it likely that Mandrake 10.0 will detect the change easily (new USB controllers, etc.), or will it complain and refuse to boot? Or somewhere in between?

 

Anyone else have any experience of this?

 

Basically, I'd like to plan whether I should expect to fix this tomorrow evening, or if I should write off my weekend doing software reinstallation and recovery.

 

[moved from Installing Mandrake by spinynorman]

[Shadowchaser]

sellis,

 

i had something similar happen to me about a year ago, My mobo went completely down the drain during a power outage.. anyway i got my new mobo and processor and all i did was add my memory, drives, sound and video and when i boot MDK it found it all. At the time i was using MDK 9.2... at best i think you have a 50 / 50 chance of no problems remember if this was winblows there would be close to 100% of OS re-installation.

by the way when i first booted MDK ask for Disc1 because of a PCI-Bridge Change after that it was OK that's were the 50/50 part comes in :D

anyway good luck,

-ShadowChaser

[bvc]

if everything stays the same except for the mobo you should be ok

[pmpatrick]

I've replaced the mb twice with mandrake. I recommend that after you physically replace the board, stick in install cd-1 and do an "upgrade" install slecting no packages. It only takes a few minutes and the install program will automatically redetect and reconfigure your hardware and leave your installation/data otherwise untouched. This has worked fine for me on two occasions. Just be sure to get your hard drive(s) and optical drives back in the same ide channel and set the same as master or slave. Otherwise you could have trouble booting.

Edited February 3, 2005 by pmpatrick

[sellis]

Well, that's reassuring. Assuming that everything else is basically OK, it sounds like it should be simple.

 

We shall see!

 

Edit: 50 posts! Apparently, I win a penguin.

Edited February 3, 2005 by sellis

[Guest alose]

About 6 months ago I replaced an Athlon system with an Athlon64 and replaced the motherboard and video. The only concession I had to make was stick in my 5th (or maybe 4th) install cd and hit enter when it reconfigured my video card.

[daniewicz]

I had Mandrake 10 installed on a harddisk that I later retired. I forgot about the drive and its contents until recently when I built a computer out of spare parts. My collection of spare parts included the retired drive. EVERY piece of hardware was different from the original install, and Mandrake still booted. Amazing.

 

I then wiped it clean and installed Windows 98 so my 6 year old daughter could play Barbie. So sad. :)

[sellis]

Right-o. That wasn't pleasant, but I am back up and running after about 3 hours' work.

 

Physical installation of the new mobo, and plugging all the case leads etc back in was about half that; the rest was convincing Linux to boot.

 

What I hadn't realised was that the old mobo had 4 ide channels rather than the usual 2 - it had a built-in RAID controller and this was assigned to /dev/hda-/dev/hdd. Therefore my boot drive was /dev/hde rather than its new assignment - the more usual /dev/hda.

 

Cue a lot of fiddling around in the rescue console (thanks to pmpatrick for suggesting booting to installation CD 1 - that would not have occurred to me until about this time Sunday). A quick edit of lilo.conf and fstab to change all the hard drive identifiers did the trick. Reinstalling the boot loader was then necessary to activate the changes to lilo.conf.

 

There have been some minor teething problems after that. My ndiswrapper-based WLAN configuration had been removed from modprobe.conf, but this happens all the time and I'm getting to be a dab hand at putting that back, so no sweat there.

 

I did a lot of fiddling around with the sound drivers, because the audio system had changed and I was getting now sound. Finally, of course, it turns out that the speakers were plugged into the mike socket. (D'oh. I should have learned my lesson from the time I tried to install a scanner, but that's another thread...)

 

So, there are a couple of minor problems remaining:

 

The cdrom doesn't mount on boot even if there's a disk in the drive - ejecting it and closing the draw mounts it nicely though. This is odd - it doesn't show up in the mount list even though it's set up in fstab.

 

Finally, the USB is not detecting my pendrive - the new mobo has USB 2.0, so that might be causing some confusion I'll read around the issue first before coming begging for help though.

 

Just in case anyone cares, the old motherboard was an Elite K7VTA3 and the new one is a PCChips M848ALU - cheap and cheerful at £19 from ebuyer. I also got an extra 256MB stick of memory, which amazingly was more expensive! There must be literally 1000 components on the motherboard; how they churn them out this cheap I don't know, even using automation.

 

Anyway, if I find a solution to my CD and USB problems, I'll post them here.

 

Edit: I solved the USB problem. Harddrake handily displays what modules a given device is expected to use. My old usb controllers used "uhci-hcd" and the new one "usb-ohci". A quick edit to /etc/modprobe.conf and everything seems to be OK.

Edited February 5, 2005 by sellis