One of my crunchers has died :-(
The motherboard has fried its little self in a most peculiar way - the area around the connector to the front panel has become toast, so it won't start at all, never mind boot. This cruncher had been doing random turn everything off for a few weeks that was "cured" by giving everything a good shake about. Initially I thought it was an errant connector (that was the item that responded best to a quick prod and poke) so dug out, from a friend, a spare known working case and plugged everything in and now what had been an intermittent fault became a hard fault.
So what's the escape plan until I can get another system built?
My first thought is to pull the hard disk and put it against a known working mother board, crunch the queue, having set "no new tasks", then revert the donor to its current status, and hope I don't loose too many WU along the way....

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

The good thing about PCs is that you only lose so-much in that you can swap parts about.

One of my crunchers has died :-(
...
My first thought is to pull the hard disk and put it against a known working mother board, crunch the queue, having set "no new tasks", then revert the donor to its current status, and hope I don't loose too many WU along the way....

When I had an MB fail, I swapped the HDD into a similar spec machine and successfully crunched the waiting queue and didn't loose a WU.

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When I had an MB fail, I swapped the HDD into a similar spec machine and successfully crunched the waiting queue and didn't loose a WU.

I too have done this between a 3.8GHz Pentium 4 670 Prescott and a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 560 Prescott a few years back.

Good luck.

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Plugged the hard drive into one of my other crunchers and it worked second boot - first boot sorted out all sorts of configuration issues (did a single core 64 bit AMD with 1GB memory, now with a dual core AMD with 3GB memory). Its working well, ploughing through the WU quite happily.

Interesting observation - in its old home there was a GTS25, and in the new home is a GT220, but the the time taken to crunch a WU appears to be very similar. This I don't understand as I thought the '250 was at least twice as fast as the '220 (reason for not moving the gpu is that I know this hardware works well, and I don't want to upset it too much by swapping psu & gpu as I would have to for the '250 to work).
Maybe next week's little task will be to grab the bullet by the tail and swap the psu and gpu over and see what happens. But that needs another round tuit.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?