On Fri, Mar 16, 2007 at 05:50:50AM +0900, John Summerfield wrote:
Paul wrote:
I recently had an MB die. The only replacement I could afford that was available quickly was an ASRock. I bought it and have been suffering ever since.
Probably the problem is a function of the particular chipset; it could arise with other brands.
No justification for poor support or bad manners though.
My daughter's system running FC6 on an ASRock P4i65G (intel 865G chipset based) works fine ... onboard sound, video, networking, IDE & SATA. I've been happy with their Intel chipset boards in the past.
My old board had 3 parallel IDE devices. The new board can only support 2. OK. This is not special to ASRock. But ....
I got 2 new SATA drives to go with it. I thought I would set them up in a RAID configuration. Was I wrong.
This MB apparently has some special BIOS code that only works with M$ software. There is NO Linux support for it. I found other references to this on the net.
ASRock support simply replied to use the Nvidia drives from the Nvidia site. Well they didn't solve the BIOS problem. ASRock did not reply when I re-asked for their help.
CentOS 4 will not recognize these drives.
I am now using FC6 and booting with NODMRAID. By doing this I was finally able to use booth drives. If I don't use NODMRAID, I get device mapping and everything is fine until I reboot - there is that BIOS problem again.
The motherboard almost certainly uses "Fake Raid" and other than initially booting the OS is pretty dim. This is the same as 99.9% of
There's no need to be so disparaging. You want cheap RAID, you get software RAID in the BIOS.
Personally, I'd rather do the RAID in my Linux box where I can control it better:-)
My personal preference is usually Gigabyte & ASRock for budget boards and Tyan & ASUS for mid to upper range desktop boards.
I've found Gigabyte's support a bit off; "gotta have windows" to flash the BIOS. This might not be a problem with more recent boards, but I've been bitten, and I'm happy with alternatives.
FWIW, my Gigabyte board (3 years old now) has the BIOS flasher built into the BIOS, so all you need is a FAT floppy with the file on it.