I recently upgraded my home pc by adding a new maxtor harddrive, lite-on dvd burner, and 19' Hyundai L90D LCD. At the same time my friend said I should upgrade my video card. I had an older ATI All in Wonder and I was tempted to upgrade it to a newer Radeon card.
Big mistake....
It took me a week of fiddling with my computer to get it up and running again. I won't bore you with all the details but they were basically as follows. When I got home when the computer booted the linux kernel core dumped with an PCI interrupt error. I disabled all the peripherals in the bios of the computer. It core dumped again. Each dump contained something about the new ATI video card. Knoppix also wouldn't boot. I called my friend - he said that he believed it was a linux problem! In windows you can change the interrupts in the hardware manager. Ya - right. Anyway I reinstalled Ubuntu 4.1 and figured out it was a conflict between the video card and the network card. I tried using the bios to configure the pci cards interrupts without any luck. At least I could boot now as long as I remove or disabled the network card. Tried another network card. Now it would boot but still randomly hang. Finally I went back to the computer store and asked for my old video card back as well as a Aopen Gforce (overkill but why not). I used both "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86" as well as "xf86config" to reconfigure it. Now when I used the old card (or the Gforce) it still hung occassionally! I ran a dmesg it still mentioned the video card! Finally after several evenings wasted I went into the bios and kept trying every combination of settings.
Turns out it was the AGP settings - when I set them on default safe settings the issue when away. Almost made me tempted to get a Mac. The screen was a great buy $400 USD and doesn't have any bad pixels. The authorized repair shop is near my office so if I have any problems I won't have to spend a fortune shipping it to the states.
Posted by Anthony at March 5, 2005 12:13 PM