New M/B-CPU refuses to boot

[Little Girl]

Hey there,

MR wrote:
>Little Girl wrote:

>> It's possible the old failing power supply did some damage on its
>> way out (in which case, I'd look hard at any of the older parts
>> still in the machine) or the new one is bad or both (in which
>> case, I'd look hard at all the parts in the machine). Are the fans
>> running when these things are happening and/or not happening?

> Interesting theory.  
>
>The SSD is a fairly reliable one that hasn't been used in a few
>years and wasn't installed anywhere during that time.
>
>The M/B, CPU, RAM and video card are all brand new and have only
>been run with the new power supply.
>
>The new power supply was in the machine before upgrade for somewhere
>between 2 weeks and a month and was working, with all the old parts,
>flawlessly, AFAICT.

Even new things can just stop working, so they're not beyond
suspicion, especially when you're dealing with several things going
wrong at once.

>I'm not sure I see how the power supply can affect the boot in this
>fashion - it works fine from the flash drive and not at all from the
>SSD boot in a brand new installation.  The partitions look okay to me
>(there are 3 - UEFI/boot, / and a swap partition.

I've been wrong about the problem being a failing power supply
before, but figured I'd toss it out there as something to consider.
It's just a guess based on your description of multiple points of
failure or multiple seemingly-unrelated odd behaviors. I'm not a
computer technician, but a member of a family in which we're all just
hobbyists who build our own computers and try to keep them running as
well as possible when bad things happen. Any time we've ever had
multiple points of failure, a power supply has been the culprit.

Failing power supplies are like the little PacMan monsters,
relentlessly running around munching on your hardware here, there,
and everywhere. They often get to cause glorious amounts of damage,
because what they're doing makes it hard to pin down the cause. If
you focus on each symptom instead of the entire collection of
symptoms, you might not realize it's a storm that you're facing.

>Any other possibilities?

You might want to review the requirements of all of the new hardware
and make sure they're being met by the old hardware. If something
isn't getting what it needs, it could misbehave. Also, others in here
have suggested running a memory test, etc.

>What would explain the boot coming up far enough to do the fsck
>on /dev/sda1 and then nothing comes (graphics expected, but even the
>virtual consoles are non-responsive).  Also, there is no grub menu,
>which is really strange.

Those symptoms could be explained by one or more configuration
options, files, directories, or partitions being missing or incorrect
or in the wrong place, so it/they can't be found by the system. I'm
sure there are plenty of folks in here who would know how to go about
systematically checking things like that.

My approach tends to be the bull-in-a-china-shop method in which I
just start completely over. Speaking of which, in the event that this
isn't a hardware issue, have you tried that by wiping out everything
you've done, repartitioning, and reinstalling everything?

-- 
Little Girl

There is no spoon.