[geeks] Upgrading/troubleshooting Athlon64 laptop (was Policy for system...)

[Phil Stracchino]

On 07/26/10 15:21, nate at portents.com wrote:
> Documentation for anything notebook related has always been iffy.  It
> would help Linux a lot, especially for notebook users, to have a single
> comprehensive source they could go to about hardware support, rather than
> rely on piecing information together from all over the way a person often
> has to these days.

Speaking of piecing together information....  :)

I have here an Athlon64 laptop which was given to me with a smashed
screen and an intermittent "It started crashing" problem.  The "It
started crashing" problem, I eventually discovered, was CPU thermal
shutdown because both of the CPU cooler's heatpipe heat exchangers were
clogged, on the inside, with a 1/8"-thick layer of dust packed to the
consistency of loose felt.

Anyway, after that, it ran quite stably for long enough for me to get it
set up to dual-boot Windows XP and a partly-finished Gentoo
installation.  Then after several days, it suddenly locked up and has
been acting oddly again ever since.  It will quite happily sit at a grub
boot prompt, waiting for input, indefinitely.  It will boot memtest86+
and run it quite happily, and so far without any sign of memory errors.
 But start to boot a Linux kernel (with a properly custom-built 64-bit
kernel, one it was previously running on for about a day), and it will
get as far as probing the available CPU speed states, about 6.1 seconds
into boot, then lock up.  Try to boot Windows XP SP3, fully patched and
with all the correct OEM drivers installed, and it locks up about the
same time into boot.  Try to boot the sysrescueCD I used to install the
unfinished Gentoo install ... same thing.

I have two questions here.  First ... I've tested, by elimination (and
eliminated as a cause), every removable or unpluggable component except
the CPU, which is an AMD Mobile Athlon64 3400+, socket 754, Clawhammer
core, 800MHz FSB, running at 1.5V.  I can find a matching reconditioned
replacement for around $30, but for the same price, I can get a new
Mobile Athlon64 4000+, still Socket 754, still 800MHz FSB, but Newark
core running at 1.35V.  Does anyone happen to know how Athlon64 boards
negotiate processor core voltage?  In other words, is it probable that
one could safely try a Newark-core processor on this board without
immediately blowing up the CPU from overvoltage?  (Unfortunately the
BIOS on the board is so minimal there's no way to configure anything
like core voltage or memory speed.)

Second ... anyone have any theories as to what might be the boot-time
problem?  I'd wonder if it was an ACPI issue except that it ran for
several days on XP, then about a day on a sysresccd and about a day on
its own kernel on Gentoo, *THEN* suddenly stopped booting anything.  The
fact that the boot-time lockup appears to be OS-independent suggests
it's a hardware problem ... but then again, the fact that it'll happily
boot and run memtest86+ suggests it's a software problem.
...My brain hurts.


The specific laptop model is, as best I can determine, an ABS Mayhem G3.
 It has the latest available BIOS image installed (which sin't saying
much; only one BIOS update was ever released, in December 2004.)  As
previously mentioned, it has an Athlon64 3400+; it has a Mobile Radeon
9700 chipset which appears to work fine (well enough to play HALO at
least, when the laptop consents to boot), and 1GB of DDR400 RAM, all of
which memtest86+ says is working fine.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.