Abit KN9 Ultra problems

[TheQwe]

Hi, after reading your (rather glowing) review of the Abit KN9 Ultra motherboard, I figured it would be a good choice for a low-cost Linux box I wanted to build. However, I've had no end of problems trying to get it to run. I get kernel oopses and panics at seemingly random times(although usually involving disk I/O), and I can't figure out why. The memory appears to be fine; I've run memtest86 about 6 times and no errors turned up. I've tried swapping video cards, reseating the RAM and CPU, trying different hard drives, nothing seems to work. I even tried downgrading the BIOS to the version used in the review.

Were there any weird options that you had to pass to the kernel to get it to boot/run properly?

Other parts I used:
AMD Athlon64 3800+ (Orleans)
Western Digital 7200RPM SATA Hard drive
Radeon 7000 PCI graphics card(this isn't a gaming machine ;)), later replaced with an ancient ATI Rage PCI card
1GB(2x512MB) DDR2-800 RAM

Any tips or pointers would be appreciated.

[Michael]

What distribution are you using? It had worked with Ubuntu Edgy Eft, Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Daily, Fedora Core 6, etc... both i386 and x86_64.

[TheQwe]

I've tried Gentoo(amd64 & x86), Fedora(amd64), OpenSUSE(amd64), Ubuntu(x86 & amd64), and an old version of knoppix(x86), and all of them have been flaky, although ubuntu and knoppix seemed to last the longest.

[Michael]

Where is Fedora 6 AMD64 stopping?

[TheQwe]

Right now it's frozen right after the "You will need Fedora Core Discs 1&2 " dialog, and anaconda is hogging the CPU. The first time I tried it, it crashed right as anaconda started.

[Michael]

Have you tried clearing your CMOS and using all the stop BIOS options?

[TheQwe]

If by "stop" you mean "stock", yes, I have. Several times. I really don't want to RMA any of the parts but it looks like I might have to... the hard part is going to be figuring out which part is bad. :P

[Michael]

If by "stop" you mean "stock", yes, I have. Several times. I really don't want to RMA any of the parts but it looks like I might have to... the hard part is going to be figuring out which part is bad. :P

Oops yeah meant stock :o

A Fedora Core 6 LiveCD was released yesterday -- you may want to try that to see if it will load and would help narrow down the troubled part.

[TheQwe]

OK, I'm pretty sure it's the processor that's bad. GCC segfaults and/or causes the kernel to panic when compiling the kernel, and the mprime torture test fails after about 20 seconds. I've tried a different power supply with the same results.

I'm going to try to get an RMA for it tomorrow.

[fikret]

Try with BIOS 1.3.
Since 1.4 there are some APIC problems, read here:http://forum.abit-usa.com/showthread.php?t=112136

[MU_Engineer]

Hi, after reading your (rather glowing) review of the Abit KN9 Ultra motherboard, I figured it would be a good choice for a low-cost Linux box I wanted to build. However, I've had no end of problems trying to get it to run. I get kernel oopses and panics at seemingly random times(although usually involving disk I/O), and I can't figure out why. The memory appears to be fine; I've run memtest86 about 6 times and no errors turned up. I've tried swapping video cards, reseating the RAM and CPU, trying different hard drives, nothing seems to work. I even tried downgrading the BIOS to the version used in the review.

Were there any weird options that you had to pass to the kernel to get it to boot/run properly?

Other parts I used:
AMD Athlon64 3800+ (Orleans)
Western Digital 7200RPM SATA Hard drive
Radeon 7000 PCI graphics card(this isn't a gaming machine ;)), later replaced with an ancient ATI Rage PCI card
1GB(2x512MB) DDR2-800 RAM

Any tips or pointers would be appreciated.

I built a machine around the KN9S (very similar board) and I needed to put the option "noapic" in GRUB's boot prompt to get it to run. Now it happily runs Fedora 6 AMD64.

[TheQwe]

OK, it turned out to be the RAM after all. The memory I bought is advertised as DDR2-800 but only runs stably at DDR2-667.

Bleh. I hope I can still get a refund...