Yeah, I have all sorts of old hardware here, and the only other one of semi-modern vintage (at my house, defined as a P4 or newer) that's this cranky is an Amptron -- and in its day, Amptron was barrel-scrapings; it was the mainboard you bought for builds if you were cheating your clients. Not coincidentally, the Amptron has a VIA chipset. The Amptron also resists booting from USB (sees the USB flash drive and claims it will boot from it, but doesn't get any further -- tho it boots fine from a USB floppy drive, so it's not that it can't at all) and so far I've only found 768mb of RAM it will speak to, and mismatched sticks at that (tho it supports a P4-2.4GHz, so it's not THAT ancient).

BTW Puppy wouldn't run on the Amptron (throws an error like it can't see the monitor: "Resolution not supported" -- an error I've also gotten from that cranky Asus board), tho it runs fine on my rather-older laptop (P3-1GHz).

[So why is it still here, you may ask? it's useful for testing stuff that might be electrically compromised; if something blows an Amptron board, I won't mourn.]

Oh yes, that's precisely why I became an Intel bigot: stable, perform exactly to spec, and get along with everything; the rivals displayed assorted instabilities and incompatibilities, and often did not perform up to snuff. Also, I used to be the hardware dude for a PC user group and vetted hundreds of donated systems; I never saw a dead Intel CPU, but I did see a few dead AMDs. And I developed an outright hatred of non-Intel chipsets.

And b/o/t/h/ all three of my modernish boards that have AMD CPUs perform poorly compared to their near-twins with nominally-comparable Intel CPUs. So for whatever drawbacks Intel may have, they still win with me. (forgot about the latest acquisition...)

Before they went purely server, my preferred mainboard was Tyan (with Intel CPU) -- utterly stable and zero issues. Since then I've accumulated a bunch of Asus boards, and they have nice layout and features, but for stability and bug-free, I've had better luck with MSI.

Reading this makes me wonder if it's the drive emulation part of the BIOS that's the issue. Normally set to Auto (as opposed to HDD, CDROM, Floppy) when booting from USB. I think Floppy is what is usually expected when making an image or CD bootable. Maybe the board interprets the boot image on the disc or stick as the wrong type? I'll have to test it when I pull the machine out of the rack next time.

I think going for stability rather than fast & flashy is something you develop as you get older. So many boards, so many broken promises (and boards). I think the last reliable board I had from Asus was either the P3 CUSL2-C, or a P4 Rambus board I had. Everything since has been crap. Probably the pressure to churn out new bling to dazzle the masses for the 6-monthly upgrade cycle! Also went the Gigabyte "Ultra-Durable" military grade as well. That died just after the year's warranty too. I've been cautiously appreciative of MSI the last few years now. Will see how long my luck lasts.

But thanks for the inspiration. I'll have to play about with the emulation settings!

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Been there, done that. Changed the battery and even rubbed the heatsinks for luck. :-/

That could be. Let us know what you discover!

Ain't that the truth? Plus I got spoiled by some very stable systems (routinely running over two years without a reboot), and became unwilling to put up with less.

Yeah, I'm not thrilled with the consumer market having become the gaming-bling churn; that's no improvement over the 3-year business upgrade cycle. So far the Asus+Intel have been reasonably good, but last time I went looking, found MSI had more of what I want, and didn't care much for what I saw from Gigabyte. The next real investment will probably be one of those i7 boards with ISA slots, cuz my MB-800 is 16 and starting to get a bit cranky. (Tho might also be the antique Sound Blaster, which has been in use since 1994!)

I'm not a fan of intel. Over priced, and I got 2x HP Stream 11s (intel CPUs). Both of which were unusable after a period of less than two years.

The CPU is either alive or dead; it doesn't "become unusable". With a laptop there are so many things that can go wrong that blaming the CPU is a bit disingenuous.

As of SquareTrade's 2009 stats, HPs had a 15% fail rate within 2 years, and 26% within 3 years -- the worst of any brand.

https://resource.squaretrade.com/lap...liability-1109

While these stats are now 10 years old, they're based on long-term data, and I very much doubt things have changed much.

BTW, at the time about 20% of laptops were lemons (defective and unfixable) right out of the box. That probably hasn't changed much either.

Side note: speaking as an occasional repair tech, about 90% of "my computer stopped working" complaints are actually due to neglected maintenance. We rarely see a linux setup old enough to have such complaints, but with Windows (where setups 10 years old or more are common) the usual problem is that it's loaded up with tempfiles and hasn't been defragged in living memory.

On the one, the screen was broke and the UEFI screen was not viewable to see why the usual sequence of ESC + F9 + arrows + enter to select a boot device didn't work. So it wouldn't boot. On the other, it would boot, but wouldn't stay on, just randomly turn off after a period. Both probably battery or thermal related. But intel is more than just the CPU. And intel CPUs are flakey and do magically stop working. At least with the ATOM chips, especially in the C#### series. There's even firmware that changes to prevent overclocking and things like that. So even a CPU is not just "hardware" anymore. And software can be very flawed.

No experience with Atom (only guy I know who has one uses it in his torrent server, so it runs at full capacity all the time) but in hundreds of desktop systems, I've never seen a dead Intel CPU, and have seen several survive being seriously cooked (one had been so hot for so long that the CPU fan crumbled at a touch. That CPU wound up in my heavy-lifting box and gave me 10 years of crash-free service.)

And it's always "compared to what?" In my experience, even when Intel messes up, the alternatives are worse. And my religion isn't brand; it's stability and longevity.

Depends on how you do measurements. AMD at mostly 1/2 the price. Even if it lasts 75% the duration, it's a "value". More so when tech advances and you toss it out for the new hotness every couple of years. Although CPUs have been a bit lacking in the new hotness category for quite a while now. 2GHz to 4GHz, the only advancement is the number of cores and the GPUs. At least in the larger scheme of things. Virtualization extras and such. But mostly the same paper specs as a decade ago.

There's also a metric you can judge linux versions by that is not available in windows: You can find linux distros compiled (until recently at least) for '486, '586, & more recent cpu specs. The k6-2 when I had one didn't benefit from anything above '586, although I believe it would run '686. You can compile for 80386, and although that wasn't the cleanest triplet, everything works.

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My SD card is corrupted. If there is a network boot image probably the FS can live longer.
Have anyone made a network boot image?

Welcome to LQ, ronaldRom.

Posting your unrelated question on top of someone else's thread is known as 'Hijacking a thread,' and is poor netiquette. Post your own thread. There is an emphasis here on getting answers to threads with zero replies.Try a search for 'linux live iso download', or substitute linux with your choice of distro, e.g. 'debian live iso download' and fopllow instructions to install.

There's little point if your usb stick is nuked. Perhaps replace that first.

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