HP Pavilion 6635 died

When it was alive, it ran Redhat 7.2 Linux. This morning,
I turned it on, went into emacs and then walked away for
a moment. When I came back, the terminal was frozen. When I pressed the
on/off switch, it wouldn't shut off. I turned off the terminal strip
and then turned it back on and rebooted. It got as far as the screen telling
you to press F1 for setup and just hung. Again the on/off switch didn't
work. I turned off the terminal strip and turned it on again. This time
all I got was a black screen. This is my main computer for all my work
and I haven't backed it up in at least a year. Hopefully, the hard drive
is ok, but I'm not sure what to do.
--
Ignorantly,
Allan Adler <>
* Disclaimer: I am a guest and *not* a member of the MIT CSAIL. My actions and
* comments do not reflect in any way on MIT. Also, I am nowhere near Boston.

Previously Allan Adler <> wrote:
> When it was alive, it ran Redhat 7.2 Linux. This morning,
> I turned it on, went into emacs and then walked away for
> a moment. When I came back, the terminal was frozen. When I pressed the
> on/off switch, it wouldn't shut off. I turned off the terminal strip
> and then turned it back on and rebooted. It got as far as the screen telling
> you to press F1 for setup and just hung. Again the on/off switch didn't
> work. I turned off the terminal strip and turned it on again. This time
> all I got was a black screen. This is my main computer for all my work
> and I haven't backed it up in at least a year. Hopefully, the hard drive
> is ok, but I'm not sure what to do.

Remove the HDD, put it in a different computer as secondary HDD
and read your data from it. I think you have a pretty good chance
of this being not a disk-issue.

Ways to connect to another computer also include per external
USB-connected enclosure. If you are ubnsure on how to do that, get
somebody with more experience to help you.

Arno

"Allan Adler" <> wrote in message
news:...
> When it was alive, it ran Redhat 7.2 Linux. This morning,
> I turned it on, went into emacs and then walked away for
> a moment. When I came back, the terminal was frozen. When I pressed the
> on/off switch, it wouldn't shut off. I turned off the terminal strip
> and then turned it back on and rebooted. It got as far as the screen
> telling
> you to press F1 for setup and just hung. Again the on/off switch didn't
> work. I turned off the terminal strip and turned it on again. This time
> all I got was a black screen. This is my main computer for all my work
> and I haven't backed it up in at least a year. Hopefully, the hard drive
> is ok, but I'm not sure what to do.

The inability to shut it off with the on/off button suggests that this may
be a dying power supply which has keeled over a little bit more each time
you tried to reboot it.

Allan Adler <> writes:

> When it was alive, it ran Redhat 7.2 Linux. This morning,
> I turned it on, went into emacs and then walked away for
> a moment. When I came back, the terminal was frozen. When I pressed the
> on/off switch, it wouldn't shut off. I turned off the terminal strip
> and then turned it back on and rebooted. It got as far as the screen telling
> you to press F1 for setup and just hung. Again the on/off switch didn't
> work. I turned off the terminal strip and turned it on again. This time
> all I got was a black screen. This is my main computer for all my work
> and I haven't backed it up in at least a year. Hopefully, the hard drive
> is ok, but I'm not sure what to do.

A friend of mine who is good at hardware came over to look at this
computer and the other failed computers in my apartment and fixed them
all. I'll comment on the others in the threads in which I mentioned
them.

What my friend did provided an important lesson in dealing with hardware:
sometimes, all you have to do is open the thing up, remove components and
put them back and it will then work. That is basically what happened.

The computer was absolutely in the dismal state I described in my original
posting. He removed the power supply from its bay to make it easy to get
at parts, but didn't unplug it. I don't remember all the details of what
happened. At one point, it did start but at a certain point in power up,
after the memory check, it complained about a memory error. We shut off
the machine (by the way, the reason that the off button didn't work is
that it was never intended to work: one of the way the system is protected
is that pressing the off button triggers a power down response from the
BIOS, and if the BIOS doesn't get off the ground in the first place,
it can't respond to pushing the off button) by turning off the power
strip. Then my friend removed the lower 64 MB memory module and put it
aside and moved the upper 128 MB memory module into its place. This
was sufficient to start the machine and boot Linux. He then put the
64 MB module into the place formerly occupied by the 128 MB module
and it also worked. Then, just to be thorough, he switched them back
and it still worked. So, it just seems to have been a problem with
memory modules coming loose and needing to be reseated.

It boots just fine and everything is intact, just as I left it. So, I can
now get back to work on what I was doing before this hiatus. There is,
however, another problem.

At my friend's suggestion, I obtained a 250 GB external HD to facilitate
backing up my system. There is a resident USB 1.1 (?) card which my friend
thought would be too slow to back up gigabytes of data. So, he brought a
USB 2.1 (?) card that he said ought to copy stuff much more quickly to
the external HD. I think he removed mine from and inserted his in Slot #1.
We tested the external HD with his cards and with the resident USB port on
the motherboard found that, perhaps for reasons having to do with the version
of Linux (RedHat 7.1), it was no faster to use his card. So, he removed it as
the last official act before closing up the machine and put mine back. That
was when the new problem appeared.

On bootup, on the screen where it tells you to press F1 for setup,
the following message appeared after the memory test:

WARNING
ERROR
Resource Conflict -- PCI Network Controller in Slot 01
Bus: 01 Device 0E Function: 00

It offered the choice of F1 for setup or F2 to continue. There was no
useful information in setup. I pressed F2 and it continued to boot
Linux normally and seems to work fine. I guess I should test the USB
ports again with a flash drive or the external HD. But this successful
boot didn't actually change anything: I get the same error every time I
boot up now. It just means I have to press F2 as part of the boot
process.

If someone knows what might be going on with this new problem, please let
me in on it.
--
Ignorantly,
Allan Adler <>
* Disclaimer: I am a guest and *not* a member of the MIT CSAIL. My actions and
* comments do not reflect in any way on MIT. Also, I am nowhere near Boston.