New Motherboard

I had been having trouble the desktop computer (the one that I built back at the beginning of this blog). The network card was acting up, so I put in a new one. Since then, it had been either locking up or rebooting. I played with a bunch of things, and then finally took it into the local shop.

The guy told me that I had cracked the motherboard because I didn't have all of the mounts and screws for the motherboard installed. It's true that they are not all there, so he was probably telling the truth.

I toughed it out for a couple of weeks with the machine running for about 20 minutes at a time.

Today, I installed a new motherboard, processor, and memory. The motherboard is from Biostar USA. The processor is a 2 GHz AMD, and the package from Tiger Direct included 512 MB of memory.

With this new board, I no longer need a separate network card or sound card. I'm still using the ATI video card instead of the onboard video.

So, I got everything installed, and it went pretty easily. After about an hour, I had the board in, all of the jumpers and cables attached, and the case buttoned up and ready to go. I powered it up and went to run Win2K. No luck! I'm getting the error INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE. My research is telling me that the problem is the fact that the drive controller has changed. So far, it doesn't look like I'll be able to recover. However, I'll take my time before I do anything drastic like reinstall from scratch.

On to the Linux partition. I fired up Ubuntu, but it wasn't able to start X. Something about an error in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. At the top of the file, I noticed the comments included the command for running the automatic detection for video.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

This utility let me pick the ATI driver, and all was well. I may have to switch to Linux full time if I can't get Windows going.

If I do decide to reinstall, I may move up to WinXP, since I now have a machine that can run it. I can get the upgrade CD from work for $10.

I'm not sure what will happen with GRUB if I install Windows (of any flavor). More research is called for. Meanwhile, I'm trying to convert everything from the Windows side (email address book, podcatcher, Picassa, etc.) over to Ubuntu. It's going slow, but I'm learning as I go.