Re: SuSE 10.0 boot problems with CPU changed

On Sunday 27 August 2006 14:59, composlinuxmisc stood up and addressed the
masses in /comp.os.linux.misc/ as follows...:

Aragorn wrote:

As a sidenote, I've known entire installed distributions to work when the
hard disk was simply moved to another computer, which included moving the
disk from an Athlon XP based machine to a Pentium III. This variety of
target computers is exactly why distribution vendors typically compile a
"one size fits all" distro - this is of course less so for /x86-64,/
since there are only two major types of CPU's in this class: the Intel
EM64T and the AMD64 platform.

OK thanks Aragorn. I thought it might have been something like me
needing to somehow change a config file for the CPU or something.

No... ;-) Hardware is all kernelspace stuff in GNU/Linux, and a CPU is
essential to get the system to boot in the first place. ;-)

Sort of like how you won't get telinit 5 and will only have a minimal
boot system if you had an entry in /etc/fstab out of place (e.g. a
removed hard drive and fstab tries to point to what doesn't exist)

Nah. ;-) Besides, the only difference is that your CPU is clocked at a
lower speed than your previous one. The core's the same though. ;-)

Intel nags and freezes, but AMD goes all the way until it burns up. And
that's apparently what happened to your original CPU. However, imagine
what such a thermal torture does to the rest of the chips...

I myself have only had one machine going "black screen" on me before -
even the POST information didn't appear on the screen - and that was
because the machine had suffered a lightning strike through the cable
modem. Needless to say that most of the hardware was toast, all except
for the floppy drive, the Adaptec 29160 SCSI adapter, the IBM SCSI hard
disk and the Plextor SCSI CD-RW device. A true testimonial of quality
for the SCSI stuff - I'm actually using all of it in this very machine
now, after it was all tested electronically - and it's already been
running without any problems in this machine here for about two years
now.

On the other hand, the Intel Pentium III and the i810 chipset-based
Chaintech motherboard, the Chaintech videocard, the Hitachi monitor -
which was in standby mode at the time of the strike - the Creative
Soundblaster and the Iomega 2 GB Jaz - which was also SCSI, but Jaz
drives were never really that good - were all waste.

Back when I was a schoolkid, I had an old Zoltrix 14.4k external modem
that literally blew up after getting struck by lightning. Fortunately
the damage stopped there. Was your modem an internal one? AIUI internal
ones are more prone to cascading the damage to other components than
external ones.

No, it was a cable modem, which is the property of my ISP. It was connected
to my machine via an Ethernet card, which of course was also fried. The
weird thing was that the UTP cable had suffered no damage whatsoever... 8-)

Computers are very sophisticated pieces of hardware, and they're not
exactly given away for free in a pack of cookies either, so don't mess
with the clock speeds anymore... ;-)

I'm really trapped between the devil & the deep blue sea. Can't afford
stock performance of better hardware but really need the FLOPS.

Is there no possibility of using some of the University's CPU cycles for
your computations? Some Universities allow their students to make use of
their big iron for project-related stuff... ;-)

Another option would be to buy up some older second-hand PC's - they should
come in cheap - and build your own Beowulf cluster. /That/ should give you
some flops... ;-)

--
With kind regards,

*Aragorn*
(registered GNU/Linux user #223157)
.

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