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. -- MailScanner is like deodorant... You hope everybody uses it, and you notice quickly if they don't!!!!