so, I got the $15 computer, and it's more broken than described - nothing happens when I hit the power button, power rails aren't brought up, but I can see that 5VSB is active. Gonna need to check the signals from the PSU tomorrow, maybe manually trip PS_ON if the circuit is bad, and see if I can't get it to boot.

Worst case I have a dumpster dive PSU i could splice in to replace the proprietary one

okay I couldn't help myself, I quickly checked and the PS_ON pin is never asserted, which probably means the Super IO chip isn't working properly... Gonna need to check if the thing is getting a clock to start with

You know, kinda gonna bet that this severed inductor next to this crystal might be causing some issues

woo, we've got life!

as in the EC (yeah sorry not super I/O) seems to be working, but unable to bootstrap the BIOS, but it's better than before!

it might be booting into bootblock recovery mode, which is a thing where it recognizes the BIOS is fucked and tries to find an image on a USB drive to flash, apparently - although this is early enough that the EC just straight up doesn't have the ability to show things on the display, so I can't tell, lol

funnily enough I have an SPI flasher now, but I don't think I have any USB 2.0 sticks to use for using the official emergency flashing method, lol

not like I can do much until I have atleast one stick of DDR3 that this thing supports

If I had started this two weeks earlier I would've saved so much money

I do have an idea for what to do for the "ridiculous" part of the challenge, which involves the fact that you can just modify the BIOS however you want as long as you flash it with an external flasher...

also, because I forgot to mention it - the fix for the EC was to yank the power cable, yank the RTC battery, hold the clear cmos button for a minute, and hold the power button for a minute, this resets all settings and forces everything to completely discharge, including the EC which otherwise is usually quite a pain to force a reset of

as for the broken inductor? connected to the Intel network chip on the board. probably won't work, but I can bodge that later

I wonder where this machine came from, sticker says it shipped with FreeDOS originally

of course I can't get a good connection to the flash, because the clip i bought is made of genuinely the softest plastic I've ever seen

it gets chewed up by the IC leads

gonna wait until tomorrow, pop in some RAM and see if I can't convince the EC to flash it for me, and if not, see if I can't just straight up glue the clip in a good position to get pin contact

I really don't feel like desoldering a SOIC-16 chip next to plastic

I premptively ordered a new clip, a replacement inductor, a new flash IC if need be, and some other stuff from Mouser.

I've now crossed the €100 mark on tools alone, although it's not included in the budget. Pain.

RAM is here, still doesn't boot and doesn't react to trying to trigger boot block recovery.

One thing that's completely possible is that it's not my garbage clip not making good contact with the flash that made the reads fail, but rather that the flash has failed! Good thing I ordered that spare. All of that should be here in the middle of next week, which should let me figure things out.

It could also be the broken inductor, since this board supports out of band management through that NIC, and IIRC that means a failed network can cause the system to fail to boot entirely when it's trying to initialize.

now that covid is done kicking my ass for the most part:

the reason it's not working is because there are two pins missing in the CPU socket

fuck LGA argh

i'll be honest - might call it here, I won't get a replacement mobo until after christmas (at which point it's too late) and replacing it with a regular mobo would involve a new PSU as well, and so on, and so on. I don't feel like rushing that before the end of year, especially with my energy being the way it is right now.