Freaking VIA

Trying to clear the CMOS on my musicbox’s VIA motherboard.  Move the jumper from 1-2 to 2-3, turn on the power for 10 seconds, turn it off, move the jumper back.  But now the system doesn’t start.

Try 15 different things to no avail.  Pull out the manual and read this:

STOP: Avoid clearing the CMOS while the system is on.  This will damage the motherboard.

Oh, freaking great, thanks VIA, since I’ve only built/repaired about a hundred systems in the past 8 years that REQUIRE THE POWER TO BE ON to clear the CMOS.  I’d love to wring the neck of the moron who designed this scheme.  Now my board is toast.  No musicbox.  No music in my car.

Good thing I don’t live 3 hours from all the people I want to see over the next 2 weeks, and good thing I don’t have two trips to the shore planned in that time.

Posted by Anthony on 6 replies

Comments:

01. Aug 12, 2004 at 08:38am by Kev:

Not to sound like a jerk, but why did you try to clear the CMOS? Just curious.

02. Aug 12, 2004 at 10:18am by Anthony:

Ironically...

I have Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO) software installed on the boot sector of the hard drive, so that my old Pentium-I 233mmx motherboard could use the full capacity of the 40gig disk.  (Otherwise it had the 32gig limitation.)  But a year or so ago, I moved the system into this new VIA motherboard with a 600MHz Eden CPU, and that board doesn’t have the 32gig limitation.  But I never got around to removing the DDO software because it’s sort of a pain.

But recently I’ve been trying to upgrade to kernel 2.6, and all goes well until reboot... for some reason, 2.6 just won’t boot, it gets to the point of remounting the disk read-write, and then says it can’t find the disk or something ridiculous like that.  I’ve tried a million things and nothing’s worked, so I figured it’s time to remove the DDO software in case it’s possibly causing trouble.  It’s installed and removed via a boot floppy, and the removal process told me that it was possible to remove it without losing the data on the drive, if I set the BIOS to auto-detect the disk.  But when I try to set the disk to "Auto" in the BIOS, it detects it right there and then fills it in, instead of actually staying as "Auto" and then detecting at each boot.  I figured clearing the CMOS would set it back to Auto.

And now, it looks like if I want to have any music in my car for the next week or so, I’m going to have to get the system running again in the old 233mmx box.

03. Aug 12, 2004 at 02:50pm by Kev:

OK that sounds all fine and well. Now for my next question: why are you trying to upgrade to the 2.6 kernel? Is there any advantage for this application? Or just the usual - that it does memory allocation better than the 2.4 series, etc...

04. Aug 12, 2004 at 03:03pm by Anthony:

I’m trying to get an ATI Remote Wonder to work (it’s an RF remote where my current one is IR), and the driver I need is in the kernel starting with 2.6.3 or something.  I haven’t been able to get it to build from scratch.

The board has the ubiquitous and crappy AC’97 audio system, and it skips.  I don’t know if it’s a memory leak, or a driver problem, or what, but after I have the system playing for a long time (hours), or after hitting the "play random album" button a lot of times, then sometimes during the first ~5 seconds of a track, 1 or 2 seconds will get skipped.  No pause, no silence, just skipped, as in it plays seconds 1, 2, 5 without playing 3 and 4, etc.  I’m hoping one of these months the audio driver and/or kernel problem that’s causing this will get fixed.  (I haven’t been able to figure out where the problem actually lies.)

And there was something with lmsensors but I forget what now -- it’s been a while since I actually compiled the 2.6 kernel and tried to use it.  But I use it for the temperature sensors on the board.

05. Aug 13, 2004 at 06:47am by Kev:

What distro are you using on this? Debian?

06. Aug 13, 2004 at 01:33pm by Anthony:

Gentoo.... which I love, but it’s a pain because it uses DevFS, which means any devices (namely sound devices) that I create aren’t actually there on the disk when I reboot to musicbox-mode.  (I boot to /bin/bash and bypass all the init scripts because 95% of the stuff isn’t needed for just playing music.)

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