[CentOS] Re: New System Build

Thu Mar 15 03:01:35 UTC 2007
Mel <mel at laamail.com>

> Slightly OT, but what are the best boards for CentOS (if any) and how do
> ECS boards stack up?
> 

I strongly recommend staying away from ASRock boards.

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.

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.