Just need the power LED to know it's on, hard drive and keyboard LEDs to know it's doing something and POST beep codes to know why it's broken.
Been building a new pc every 2-3 year since 2006-7.
Just did a X670 upgrade.... no post codes on motherboard. $500 motherboard. I've always had post codes.... I had post codes on my fucking $50 trash motherboard I used for my old NAS.
Blinkenlights and punch card reader my dude
Permanently Deleted
dmesg is always fun though nowadays it requires root or sudo
other hot utilities that start with ls: lsblk lspci lsusb lsmod
or you can just cat random /proc or /sys files
I suppose if you want to read some logs and are running systemd you can journalctl
honorary mentions to hdparm, smartmontools, lm-sensors
There's also dmidecode command that can parse BIOS info in shell it's useful
