[journey4712]

Greetings,

I've recently setup my first media pc, and running into issues left and right

The hardware is:
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive (bare drive) - OEM
SeaSonic S12 II SS-380GB 380W ATX12V V2.3 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply - Retail
ABIT I-N73HD LGA 775 NVIDIA GeForce 7100 HDMI Micro ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor Model BX80570E8400 - Retail

2xOCZ Platinum Edition XTC PC6400 512MB ram (4-5-4-15)

First i tried to install ubuntu 8.04, the i386 version locks up fairly quickly. The amd64 version takes a little longer, but ends up locking up as well

Then i tried to install fedora. Gets a farther than ubuntu, but once it gets through the stage2 install and starts downloading packages from the internet, it locks up.

So i burned the XBMC live cd to a disk, pulled out an old ATA cdrom i had lying arround and booted off that. XBMC runs for a few minutes, and then locks up.

Thought it might be an issue with the 1.5TB drive being bigger than expected so i unplugged the drive(and unplugged the random connectors from the case, esata, firewire, hd audio). Still locks up. At this point the only things connected to the motherboard were: ram, power supply, and the cdrom.

The abit board seems fairly popular with mediaPC's so there has to be a way i can get this one working, anyone have any ideas?

I also tried taking the memory from my PC(OCZ plat xtc PC6400 4-4-4-14 1GBx2) stilll locked up. Thinking it may still be the memory right now i'm running memtest86 on the memory, will let that run overnight.

Lock up means about the same thing for every distro i tried on this box. The keyboard lights blink, the screen is distorted(lines across the screen, or if its text mode i get parts of the screen blinking and garbled).

Taking any and all suggestions about how i can get this box to stay running

journey4712

[The-Boxhead]

this surley sounds like a hardware problem. either memory or graphics card.
Memetest86 is a good idea.
However i think this is graphics card since you get garbled output sometimes.
Or maybe you have tuned your bios settings to high ? try running with all your bios settings in safe mode maybe...

I would also run a hd diagnostic tools to be sure..

Lemme know your progress !

[journey4712]

Looks like memory was the problem. Not sure why it still crashed when i tested the memory from my PC, but memest found some problems with my memory. Testing again minus the bad stick and the system stays loaded up just fine. Going to have to send these mem chips back.

Most everything seems to work, except my remote control the lirc_mceusb2 driver gets loaded, i've added a debug=true to the module load command and get the following output in dmesg:

Code:

[ 2703.796203] lirc_mceusb2: Philips eHome USB IR Transceiver and Microsoft MCE 2005 Remote Control driver for LIRC $Revision: 1.47 $
[ 2703.796205] lirc_mceusb2: Daniel Melander <[email protected]>, Martin Blatter <[email protected]>
[ 2703.796206] lirc_mceusb2: debug mode enabled
[ 2703.807339] lirc_mceusb2: usb probe called
[ 2703.983137] usb 2-2: reset full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 2
[ 2704.195615] lirc_mceusb2: acceptable outbound endpoint found
[ 2704.195620] lirc_mceusb2: acceptable inbound endpoint found
[ 2704.195626] lirc_dev: lirc_register_plugin: sample_rate: 0
[ 2704.201612] lirc_mceusb2[2]: Topseed Technology Corp. eHome Infrared Transceiver on usb2:2
[ 2704.201615] lirc_mceusb2[2]: receive request called (size=0x20)
[ 2704.201619] lirc_mceusb2[2]: receive request complete (res=0)
[ 2704.201622] lirc_mceusb2[2]: receive request called (size=0x20)
[ 2704.201623] lirc_mceusb2[2]: receive request complete (res=0)
[ 2704.201625] lirc_mceusb2[2]: receive request called (size=0x5)
[ 2704.201627] lirc_mceusb2[2]: receive request complete (res=0)
[ 2704.201628] lirc_mceusb2[2]: receive request called (size=0x20)
[ 2704.201630] lirc_mceusb2[2]: receive request complete (res=0)
[ 2704.201631] lirc_mceusb2[2]: receive request called (size=0x2)
[ 2704.201633] lirc_mceusb2[2]: receive request complete (res=0)
[ 2704.201634] lirc_mceusb2[2]: receive request called (size=0x20)
[ 2704.201635] lirc_mceusb2[2]: receive request complete (res=0)
[ 2704.201652] usbcore: registered new interface driver lirc_mceusb2

It should be noted that when loading the driver is the only time the receive request called/complete lines come up. No other responce when using the MCE remote(or any other remote i have laying arround)

I tried killing lircd and then testing with irrecord, and then mode2 neither program reports any output. The light on the usb receiver is on though, and the light on the remote control blinks as well so everything seems to have power. I've done some googling on lirc and lirc_mceusb2 but i'm not turning up anything usefull, for the most part everything says insert the module, verify your receiver is seen in dmesg, and your golden, but i'm not seeing anything at this point

I should probably open a new thread about it though, as its unrelated to this one. I'll give it another day of debugging before that though.

journey

[The-Boxhead]

Great that you found your malfunctioning hardware !

Regarding Lirc you should browse the main linux forums cause there is alotta posts there about your issues.

good luck !