mathew's journal

Testing

Once you’ve finished assembling the machine, I suggest plugging it in and powering it up once before going to the effort of holding all the wires out of the way, putting the case lid back on, and screwing it into place. Plug in keyboard, monitor and AC cord, and push the power switch on the front.

The first thing you’ll hear should be the power supply fan start. If you don’t hear that, either you have a dead PSU, or you didn’t connect the case switches properly.

Next the PC will probe the IDE devices. You should see the CD-ROM drive LED flicker once, then the hard drive LED. If you got a Barracuda then you probably won’t hear the hard drive spin up or seek, but you might hear the CD-ROM. If the LEDs don’t flicker, check that the drives are plugged in correctly, and try to determine if they’re spinning up and just not being seen by the PC, which would mean general motherboard problems or IDE cable problems.

Next, if all goes well you’ll see something on the screen. If not, check the monitor’s plugged in, turned on, brightness turned up, and so on. If there’s still no screen display, it could be monitor problems or PC problems. Distressed beeping from the PC means problems with the video hardware or the RAM—all-in-one motherboards like the EPIA use part of the system RAM for video, so if the system RAM is bad you won’t get any video output.

The final hurdle is to push the appropriate key and jump into the BIOS setup screen. If you get that far, take a look to see that the PC recognized the hard drive and optical drive. Also, check if the total memory is about right, once you allow for 64MB being deducted for use as video RAM.

At this stage, you might be tempted to fiddle with the BIOS settings. I found that the defaults were pretty reasonable, except that USB keyboard support is disabled.

My next test was to connect the machine to the ethernet and boot KNOPPIX, which is a bootable CD containing a complete Linux install and various applications.

 

Depending on version, KNOPPIX may require the ’noapic’ cheat to be happy. Basically, when the initial screen appears inviting you to push F2 to help, you type knoppix noapic to boot with APIC disabled. APIC is advanced power management, so you can do without it for testing purposes.

For me, KNOPPIX booted, found all the hardware, found the network, got an IP address, and there I was with a full Linux desktop and Internet. I browsed the web a bit, then prepared for the next stage—the OS install…