Super Big Grin

I'm am super chuffed. I received my first delivery from ebay. The five mother boards and cpu's I've bought. Well I figured I should test them somehow, but how? I've not ordered the PSUs yet or anything. I remember reading in the Helmer blog that he shorted a circuit with some wires in order to start his computer (like they do in American films to start a stolen car), so I decided to try the same trick.

The first big hurdle I faced was were to get a power supply from. Well as I've said before I've got an old Acer Aspire kicking around. It's a perfectly acceptable machine in good working order. So what do I do? Time to get the screw driver out. I'm kind of getting a little nervous at this point. It is the frightening realisation that I'm taking apart something that I may not be able to put back together again. There is also the chance that I may just make a clumsy mistake and break something important; but I ignore those thought the best I can and carry on plugging away at it. Twenty tense minutes later and amongst a rather large pile of other bits (dvd drive, hd ...etc) I've managed to extract the all important PSU. Well I'm looking at this thing and I notice that the socket is four connectors smaller than the one on my new motherboard. Other than that It seems to fit so I try to ignore the discrepancy and hope the motherboard will be similarly forgiving. The motherboard already has the cpu, heatsink, fan, and memory attached so I plug in the keyboard, mouse, monitor and the finally the power cable. I also put a usb stick containing a bootable debian linux OS in one of the USB ports.

A little green light comes on. Other than that nothing. Ok, the whole point of this task is to test that the motherboard, memory and CPU work so surely a little green light is a good thing? You'd think so wouldn't you. At least that proves that the PSU works a little, which is good considering it has four less connectors than the socket it's plugged into! But then again I knew the PSU worked because it came from a perfectly good machine (well it was a perfectly good machine). I play around for a while putting a jumper on random pegs and adding the power source back in. Nothing. I have a good look over the motherboard for any clear signs of which pegs need shorting. All the writing is too small for my old eyes. All I get for my trouble is really tired and achy eyes. I get a little pang of despair at this point. Ok, regroup and think. That's it refer to the manual. Ahh, it didn't come with one. No problem that's what the net is for.

One quick google search for "Asus M2A-VM manual" and it pops up top of the list. Fifteen minutes of intense concentration later and I know exactly what I've been doing wrong. I was trying to start the computer by shorting two prongs of the serial port connector. Ah. This may have shorted the whole board or had no effect whatsoever. I am at this point hoping for the latter. It certainly wasn't the bit I needed to short to turn on the computer.

However now I think I know what I do need to connect. So now I'm looking for the pin 5 and 6 of the 20-8 pin system panel connector. I find them, plug everything back in and apply the screw driver. Nothing, nothing, then suddenly the cpu fan starts spinning lights flash on the monitor and the bios start to load. What! I did it I actually did it! Then no the roller-coaster grinds to a halt. A bios password is required and I wasn't given a password. Ok I've already read about this during my previous fifteen minutes of intense concentration and I'm ready to give it a try. So I unplug the PSU again, pop out the motherboard battery and change the jumper settings for 10 seconds. Put everything back and then I'm ready.

Second time and no bios password. After a little routing around I find that the bios has picked up my usb card and is treating it as a hard-drive. Sweet. I close it all down and nothing again. Then it all kicks off and Debian starts to load. A couple of seconds later and it's all done. The mouse works, keyboard works, monitor works, it recognises the dual core cpu and the memory. A complete success and I am super chuffed.

After patting myself on the back some it occured to me that if all the rest of the motherboards are ok and recognise my usb stick I may be able to get away with not buying any SATA hard drives at all. I could instead use some of the usb sticks I have lying around. If I do this for five out of six motherboards in my server farm I could save ten to thirty pounds each. This would potentially save me buying ninety plus pounds worth of hard-drives, be quicker to load and use far less energy. In I don't need hard-drives because each node would write all it's data to shared disk or an external NAS. The only downside I can see at the moment is that there won't be any disk space available for virtual memory usage. But given that it would be much slower than using actual memory that may not be such an issue. I only have one gig of DDR in each motherboard at the moment, but according to my new manual I can install as much as eight if I use a 64bit OS. This would potentially avoid use virtual memory at all.