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. -- Cheers John -- spambait 1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu Z1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu Please do not reply off-list