Re: Bizarre hardware

Michael <[email protected]> Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:28:49 +0100
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.gentoo.user
Message-ID	<2276736.irdbgypaU6@rogueboard>
On Wednesday, 22 April 2026 00:04:33 British Summer Time Peter Humphrey 
wrote:
> On Tuesday, 21 April 2026 23:43:55 British Summer Time Wol wrote:
> > On 21/04/2026 23:16, Philip Webb wrote:
> > > May I recommend building your own machine from parts ?
> > > -- it's not difficult & if anything is defective, it's only  1 
> > > part.
> > 
> > Until the part is not defective but it doesn't work ...
> > 
> > I bought a compatible mobo and cpu, which wouldn't boot. I even told
> > the repair shop what was wrong, and they botched it.
> > (Unfortunately, I'd hung on to the gear far too long before
> > actually getting round to do anything with it.)
> > 
> > Basically, the problem was the obvious one - the mobo had been lying
> > around in the shop, and the cpu was too new for the bios. All it
> > needed was for the shop to find an old cpu, boot and update the
> > bios, and charge me £50. Instead, they replaced the mobo and
> > charged me £200. All of a sudden I realised the mobo was still in
> > warranty, sent it back to the manufacturer, and they updated the
> > bios and sent it back. Unfortunately, I never got round to getting
> > another chip, so that mobo is still sitting there unused, and
> > probably never will be :-( Oh well...
> [sigh...]
> 
> You know where the path leads that's paved with good intentions...
> Yeah. me too.

You can get rid of old gear on ebay 'sold as new', or in the firesale 
sections of various hardware forums.  You may not get the full retail 
price, but you should at least get something for it to contribute to 
your next project.

I haven't used SystemRescuecd since it moved over to systemd.  The very 
last time I used it, I had to rebuild it in order to include firmware 
for a Radeon card plus an out-of-kernel driver and firmware for a 
wireless NIC.  It could be you had to follow a similar approach for your 
hardware.  The current SystemRescuecd customising process appears rather 
easier than what I had to do.  It uses 'System-Rescue-Modules' as an 
overlay squashfs, explained here:

https://www.system-rescue.org/Modules/
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