After using Knoppmyth for going on about 3 years now, and running just fine on R5D1, about a week ago I started to get intermittent freezes.

Within the span of week, things went downhill fast. A few rounds of push-the-button reboots, and I now can't boot at all... the system hangs on POST, with the error "keyboard error or no keyboard present".

The thing is, I *do* have a keyboard on there, and I've tried several keyboards, both USB and serial, and can't get past this message.

The motherboard is an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe, with a Sempron 2500+ CPU and 512 Mb of Ram. 2 Tuner cards (both PVR-250) and 2 hard drives with the LVM setup.

I'm thinking either the motherboard is shot, or the hard reboots borked somthing on the disk... the drives aren't making any unusual noises, so I thought I'd get a new motherboard, and just swap that out with all my current components... no luck-- nobody I can find sells this board anymore.

Since this crashed unexpectedly, it's been a while since my last backup and if possible, I'd like to preserve the contents as I build a new system...

So my questions are:
1- Any idea what's going on and if I can fix the current system? If not...
2- can I boot a new, different system with the current drives transplanted into it? Or is the system installed somehow now specific the current hardware? (motherboard, processor, video card)?

If I can use the current drives in a new system, I'll get the new hardware, boot, do a backup, and then update the whole schmeer.

Sure would love to salvage what I can from this system!

Thanks for the advice.

Have you tried reseating all your connectors and using the BIOS reset jumper?

You're not even getting to the disk(s). The BIOS on your MB is complaining that it can't find a keyboard. 99.9% sure you'll find this to be a hardware issue...

Try tjc's suggestion of reseating. Be sure to power off, pull the power cord, pull everything off and, if you have the means to, blow all the dust out of the unit/backpanel/etc. Amazing what some dust in the "right" places can do...

No joy.

I disconnected everything, did the compressed air thing, did the jumpers to reset the CMOS, and now I get nothing at all. Not even the keyboard not found error.

Man, was that thing dusty, however! Set me coughing with the cloud that came out of it.

SOoooo.... now I'm thinking I need a new motherboard, and probably will upgrade the whole schmeer to the "reference platform" hardware... except that I'd love to just transplant the drives from this system...

will that work if the hardware they're attached to is new? Or am I left with reformatting and installing fresh?

I dont know if it helps, but i had similar symptoms, a few freezes, then no boot, but then the occasional boot, but didnt make it to myth... turns out i had a slowly dying PSU.. jammed in one i had sitting about, and its all go again... so, if i were you id try another PSU before investing in a new MB (ram etc etc)...

Feel free to totally ignore this post, as im no where near qualified to comment..

Cheers,

Nathan

You're right to replace the mobo. If the BIOS doesn't work, there's nowhere to go.

You can probably re-use the disks, but will probably have to reinstall. I'd say try it first as-is. Worst that can happen is it doesn't work. You may have to tweak xorg.conf for the new vid card, but maybe not even that.

Good luck.

Mike

P.S. What are these disks? SATA? Large capacity? If not, I'd be buying the WD5000YS - very quick and quiet

_________________
*********************
LinHES 7.4
Australian Dragon
*********************

Of course, it could be that there was an overheating problem somewhere, what with all the dust. What I would recommend is looking at your processor heatsink and checking that the processor and fan are OK. Also a general lookover the motherboard, so see if anything has released the magic smoke.
There may be PSU issues, so I would replace this first, if you getting a new processor/MB combo, you will probably need a new one anyway what with all the extra power connections on modern motherboards.

Bruce S.

_________________
Updated 2019/10/26: AthlonII X2 265 Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P
16Gb PC 1866 DDR3, 500GB+2TB+4TB SATA HDD,
SATA DVD-RW Asus DRW-24D5MT , NVIDIA GeForce GT1080
Hauppauage Nova-T 500, Nova-T LinHes R8.6.1