Elderly PC may have a HW fault - how to isolate/fix?
 

I've got an elderly wreck of a Compaq Deskpro 2000 that I'm trying to turn into a mini-mainframe. As far as I know, this is what's under the hood:

Pentium 166 MMX
64 MB RAM in DIMMs
1 3Gb and 1 2Gb HDD
One 32x CD-ROM
1 3c900 10mip Ethernet Card (on PCI)
S3 Trio64V2/GX Onboard Graphics (1 Mb)
Some really weird motherboard from Compaq that has AMD chips for what I think is the northbridge (on an Intel system? :eek: )

I've been trying to get Debian onto this system (using floppies!) for about the past day. But the installer always seems to cop out whenever it feels like it - different parts of the install, no reasons given. I then tried to install Fedora Core 1 (again, using floppy to start the CD) and that made it into the GUI before it too copped out. So, I'm thinking there has to be a problem with the hardware on this poor thing. My first reaction: let's whip out memtest86 ..... which has been running fine for the past few hours :S So now I'm practically at a loss - how do I find out the faulty hardware and fix it? Are there bootable CD diagnostics available that'll work with this old _Compaq_?

Thanks for any replies

i always suspect irq conflicts when machines barf at install time. pull your nic out( and any other cards you can live without, for the time being). then try the install.

Egad! IRQs, I'd practically forgotten those existed - curse you Asus for turning me into a softie! :P Thanks I'll try that out once memtest86 finishes off it's last pass.

bios's love to make the nic and video share irq's, which should work in theory, but never seems to.