[myth-ie] hardware hell

[Glen Gray]

Inspired by Brendan, and also with the wife out tonight, I decided to  
have a go at working on the MythTV box again.

It's a Via MII120000 mini-itx with 512MB RAM, 400GB PATA drive, WinTV  
PVR 500 and a pcmcia ne2000 nic as the onboard nic is dead (and always  
was).

After 3 hours of poking, prodding and reseating everything, I'm no  
wiser to wtf is going on. Most annoying.

I've run memtest86 for a full pass, I've reseated the RAM, I've  
disconnected everything from the board and reconnected it. I just  
can't seem to get this thing to work.

I had left it sat in the BIOS for a good while on the PC Health check.  
Didn't seem to heat up an aweful lot and kept ticking along.

After doing the BIOS and memtest86 run, it seemed to boot ok (into  
single user mode). Once on there, I attempted to connect to the  
internet and get some updates, hoping that perhaps there was a known  
issue in current kernels that may have been fixed with an update. apt- 
get upgrade seemed to be motoring along when the TV went black, dead.  
After that I couldn't even boot to single user mode. It goes dark  
during the boot process, around where the driver modules are loading.

I tried booting with just the RAM and HDD attached, same problem. I'm  
kind of stumped. Going to try some desperate measures next to see if  
it's the hardware of software, like installing windows or something.

Sleepily,
--
Glen Gray
slaine at slaine.org