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[asbokid]

Not sure SheddyIan,

It was planned to build a gigabit ethernet switch powered by a fanless 8 watt TDP AMD64 CPU. The mainboard, a Siemens D2703-A, a £20 board for industrial control applications has a single PCI slot but no PCIe.   The project was abandoned as it wasn't clear that the solitary PCI bus (cascaded with risers) offers the required bandwidth to support the switching of ethernet frames from four ports at gigabit speeds.   The project should be finished to prove one way or the other!

cheers, a

EDIT:

Here's the PCI SATA300 card fitted in the Siemens mainboard.



Here's the threadbare board.  Note the plugged vias where the PATA connector should be!



sorry, drifting off topic

[sheddyian]

Yes, sorry for dragging this off topic.

Thanks for reply, Asbokid, that's very interesting.  I wasn't aware of boards like that - might do a bit of googling later.  I assume they can't run a normal OS though (Windows/Linux) without some fiddling?

Ian

[geep]

Seems like I got a happy ending. Assembled new mobo using old PSU - which seemed good according to volts reading using my loadtester. Installed Win7 on new 2TB drive.
Connected "broken" 250G PATA drive via the PATA/SATA adapter. Win 7 Partition Editor showed it as an empty drive. So did GPartEd from Parted Magic.
Before trying to restore the MBR I backed up the whole 250G twice (2 x 70  mins approx) using dd on commandline from Parted Magic LiveCD. Identical md5 sums (2 x 25 mins approx) - sounded promising.
When old PC had started misbehaving I had backed up the MBR and Partition table using dd - dd if=/dev/sda of=MBR.dump bs=512 count=1 as per http://www.unixmen.com/save-and-restore-mbr-in-linux/
So with fingers crossed I rewrote the MBR/Partition table from my saved file - and to my amazement it worked.
I can see all my FAT and reiserfs partitions and lots of files - which I suppose are all present.
From now on I'll always make sure that I've got a backup of the MBR/Partition tables.

And it seems my worries about UEFI were groundless, although maybe because I installed Win7 32bit on (only!) a 2TB disk, and not a bigger one.
The UEFI BIOS interface is all nice and graphical, and Win7 created an old style MBR disk, rather than a GPT disk.
The mobo was a bundle from Currys/PC World outlet on ebay - and am well impressed with what I got for £77.32 ASUS Intel Dualcore G620 Motherboard, Silver Plus Edition Bundle , to which I added a 2nd 2GB stick of RAM.

Cheers,
Peter
 

[roseway]

That sounds like a fine job then. :clap2: