following up a message from Roy J. Tellason to JIM HOLSONBACK:

 RJT> JIM HOLSONBACK wrote in a message to ROY J. TELLASON:

 JH> 

 RJT> Checked the battery,  it's a common coin cell,  CR2032,  and measures
 RJT> 0.5v! Never saw one get that low...  Pulled one off another board that
 RJT> was laying around here that I can't use for other reasons (keyboard
 RJT> connector's in a strange place),  and checked that -- 2.8v -- but it
 RJT> gives me the same result.

 JH> Hmm. I know a fellow who once solved just such a problem by using a
 JH> rat-tail file :-). 

You know a fellow who fixed *what* with a rat-tail file?



 RJT> Re-seated the ram,  and next time I power up it sees only 32M of 64.

 JH> Dang! You were really on a roll!

I still am...  

 RJT> And coming down with the bug while I was at it...

 RJT> I'm working on my first cup of coffee since Friday,  here.

Could do with another one,  now that I read that,  it's gonna be a long night.

 RJT> Tried again,  got past that,  and it hangs right after selecting video
 RJT> mode at the boot prompt,  with a couple of funny characters top left
 RJT> corner of the screen.

 RJT> Tried changing the video card out,  and now I'm at that "System
 RJT> Configurations" box that the BIOS puts up there,  and it's hung again.
 RJT> Tried setup again, saving it again,  and it goes,  gets partway into
 RJT> the boot process,  and hangs again,  right after "Freeing unused kernel
 RJT> memory: 112k freed".

 JH> I know you think that Linux is your friend, but maybe at this point
 JH> it is your enemy? Sounds to me like your HDD is now farkeled, and
 JH> you might be better off going back to FDD boots and diagnostics.

Not,  as it turned out.



 RJT> Yep,  Looks like I'm gonna be shopping for some hardware again today.
 RJT> :-(

Got another board (see nearby post),  and it's *faster* with the same chip
in there.  To boot,  etc.

 JH> My recommendation: look for something well less than 5 years old,
 JH> for once.  [:-D.

Looks like what I got is "SIS Chipset" -- ever heard of these folks?

 RJT> The problem is that in order for me to find something I can use I
 RJT> need an AT style board,  which kinda limits my options there. 
 RJT> Once I accumulate some other cases w/ working power supplies
 RJT> that'll be a bit different,  but I'm not there yet.

This one has both connectors,  as it turns out.



Got this board today,  anyhow,  and popped the K6-200 in there,  and ran
the memory test again,  to see if it would fail like it did with the other
board -- it didn't!  Which is good,  because it's got four times the L1
cache of the P200.  Just for yucks I checked CPU prices at the store,  and
for a P200 they want 15 bucks,  for a K6-200 they only want $9!  How
bizarre,  but it works for me...

Fixed one config issue with XFree86,  which now comes up.

Only problem I gotta fix now is this "network unreachable"
nonsense,  which is only a matter of time,  since I've hit that one before,
 and _then_ I go get my email.  Hopefully this evening sometime.  

Making progress,  at least.  More later.

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