What do you do when you have the flu? Well, I sit down and try to debug a computer system which has become unreliable. In particular, the little gem is the gadget pictured on the right, my old SV24 with an 850Mhz Celeron Processor in it. I’ve thought about turning it into a MythTV box, since it largely goes unused, and I’m vaguely nervous about the predicted death of Tivo.

So, what’s the problem. Well, I’ve had difficulty installing software on it. I put a DVD drive in it awhile back, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. I burned Fedora Core 3 onto it, and verified that the disk would boot and check in another machine (Fedora nicely includes a checksum routine to verify disks during install), but it fails with hdc media errors in this box. Repeatedly. Predictably. I’ve tried changing every bios thing I can figure, disabling DMA, doing all sorts of stuff, no dice.

This morning I swapped the drive for an old 10x CDROM that I had lying around. For some reason it doesn’t want to boot at all from this device (powers up, but when the CDROM probe happens, no love). Grrr. Not happy.

Strangely enough, I think there might be something electrical which is wacky in the box. If I leave the case off, sometimes the machine refuses to boot at all, instead just making a series of short clicks as if the reset button were being pushed. What’s that about?

I really don’t want to retire this box needlessly, but I’m beginning to get a bit annoyed with it. Anyone have any ideas and/or expeirence which might be useful?

Flu is a bit better. I’ll probably try to work a half day today.