[CentOS] Re: New System Build

Thu Mar 15 15:40:05 UTC 2007
Scott Silva <ssilva at sgvwater.com>

Mel spake the following on 3/14/2007 8:01 PM:
>> 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.
That is true of most on-board raid controllers. They aren't true raid. You
can't expect to get a true hardware raid as an "addon".
> 
> 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.
Asrock is a low end board maker. If you want reliable, you have to spend a
little.
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