Is this a BIOS problem?

[wendellp]

A machine with an Intel DH57JG motherboard is showing some problems after sitting unused for two years.

1. It will not boot from an external USB drive. I have a bootable Linux image on a thumb drive. This machine used to be able to boot this way. I tested the drive with another machine and it is OK. I went into the BIOS and verified that the correct boot order is set and that the USB drive is correctly identified. When I try booting from the USB drive, the machine goes through the BIOS startup then stops at the blinking cursor.

2. ACPI thermal monitoring doesn't work. Putting "acpi -V" does not return any thermal sensor entries. It used to work on this machine. I put the HDD in another machine and verified that the ACPI installation is working.

 

[Ultima99]

Try clearing cmos and or reflash the bios.

 

[Nenu]

Its possible some capacitors have reached EOL.
I've got lots of old kit that worked great before I stashed it away, but now can barely get a response from.

 

[wendellp]

Try clearing cmos and or reflash the bios.

Cleared the CMOS and updated BIOS to the latest firmware, but it made no difference.

I did identify the problem, though. It turns out that the DH57JG has a history of being very buggy with Linux. I realized that what I had working previously on this machine was Squeeze with kernel 2.6, but I had been trying to use Wheezy and Jessie with kernel 3.2. I went back to 2.6 and bootup worked much better.

Just goes to show the importance of choosing your hardware carefully.