[myth-ie] my PVR-350 is in a bad way

[Brendan Kehoe]

Our machine, with the ieee1394 driver explicitly not loaded, was working
pretty well through the afternoon.  I shut it down, plugged in the 15pin
cable to the "regular" video card, and booted off a Knoppix (or Kanotix,
I forget) CD and ran memtest86+ and let it pass 3 full sets of tests. 
Memory's fine.

Shut it down, unplugged, vacuumed out the interior.  Turned it on---and
the CD & disk did their init sequence, but nothing else happened.  The
capslock key on the keyboard doesn't work.  Hmm.  Try again...nope. 
Unplug the 15-pin CRT cable, no difference.

Take out the video card from the shuttle's AGP slot, try again...it gets
a bit further.  I see it properly init the keyboard, and caps lock
works.  But it's still not doing much else, presumably cuz it has no
video card.  Just for kicks I made it boot off the CD, and instead of
memtest86+ I blindly hit return and it cranks its way through the
process of booting.  I go over to my wife's iBook after it's quieted
down, and I see that I can ping it.  That means it booted enough to do
DHCP and get an address for the Ethernet interface.

So this gives me some hope.  Tomorrow I'm going up to the shop on
Patrick St here in Dun Laoghaire and getting joe random video card, and
see if that helps us get back into a usable state.

Very odd coincidence, all this going on with the booting and such and
now the GeForce2 GTS card happens to die?  I'm actually paranoid that in
my clever vacuuming stunt I bumped something (one of the big honkin'
capacitors maybe?).  But the fact that the livecd thing seemed to do an
awful lot of stuff tells me it doesn't appear to have been fried.

Of course, there's the fact that it was getting a kernel oops on the
1394 device out of nowhere.  I'm going to try to attribute this to the
truly remarkable amount of dust that had accumulated inside.  We'll see
how things go tomorrow.

Oh, the drama.

B