I think it's okay to diagnose the problem on the list, I'm interested in weird and esoteric failures

I second what Kevin is saying.

You are probably experiencing some sort of hardware failure in either power supply or motherboard that could have been triggered by switching the computer on and off a few times.

You can open power supply case and visually examine for any burn marks or defective capacitors.
Try unplugging raid controller and see if the system loads bios.
If that doesn't help try several combinations of memory modules -- the system probably doesn't have ECC memory and that might be causing problems.

If that doesn't work, It might not be worthwhile diagnose the error, because you will need:
(1) a working power supply to verify that power supply is at fault
(2) a working motherboard -- and plugging it it might be a bit of a chore.

You can also try going to canadacomputers do diagnostics but they could be expensive.

It's probably much more time efficient to get new cpu/memory/motherboard combo along with new power supply and transplant it into an old case.

Alex.

On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 11:12 AM, Joe Murray <joe.murray@jmaconsulting.biz> wrote:
I have an old workstation with an Asus P5Q motherboard, Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz and 6 500Gb drives. I've only done a few Ubuntu installs, and I'm having trouble getting past a problem with installing on a RAID device - my guess is that it was a problem with master boot record or something. Not sure if I have done something quite bad, but for some reason it no longer even shows BIOS stuff (yes, I've checked the cabling), and the power source doesn't sound quite normal for a few seconds after power on. Please contact me (offlist if that is netiquette here) with suggestions of who could help me with this fairly simple hardware/sysadmin task, either yourself or an organisation or person.

Thanks,

Joe Murray, PhD
President, JMA Consulting
joe.murray@jmaconsulting.biz
skype JosephPMurray twitter JoeMurray
416.466.1281



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