Dapper & ASUS P5GDC-V Deluxe

[Telkwa]

This motherboard would not even recognize a known-good Breezy CD in the optical drive. It at least started to read a Dapper CD, but it hangs at detecting hardware. I'm running a simple config, just one SATA HDD and an optical on the PATA bus. When I built it I left the SATA detection as "Standard IDE" in BIOS and am now wondering if that was a mistake? Traded optical for another, no dif.
Gonna try PCLinuxOS in a day or two. Any others I should try?

[Michael]

Did you try an Edgy Eft build? Did you try updating the system BIOS? It looks like the ASUS P5GDC-V Deluxe uses the i915G Chipset, so there shouldn't be problems with any recent Linux distribution and kernel.

[drag]

Ya.. the i915 should be well supported so you shouldn't need to have it 'pata' emulation. Which I think is what 'Standard IDE' means, but I am not sure about that. Linux can use it natively as a SATA drive.

If it still has problems.. There is a known problem I've heard with Dapper regarding USB devices and such. On a different forum there was a guy that couldn't install Ubuntu until he unplugged his computer's card reader.

Also disabling ACPI may help. That often causes hangs when probing hardware.
Don't confuse it with APIC, which you probably want. (it allows your system to have more then the generic number if IRQs that something like a ancient 386 pc would have)

Also running memtest86 is always a good idea. Run that for like 8 hours or something to see if there are any memory errors. A good computer will have ZERO errors. A average computer will have one or two memory errors every 400 days or something. A bad computer will have memory errors that appear randomly or only every once in a while..

[Michael]

Originally Posted by drag

A bad computer will have memory errors that appear randomly or only every once in a while..

Or near continuous errors with a bad overclock

[drag]

Yep.
If the errors are massive and continious then it's usually means a bad configuration. Either bad memory mismatch with the the motherboard or something is not sitting right it's slot or, of course, overclocking.

It's the errors that are in small amount on specific regions of memory that often come and go is what spells out disaster.

[Telkwa]

Wish I'd done some homework on how to set up the SATA config in BIOS. It was my first homebrew and I was scared to change anything! Sounds like I shoulda changed that SATA setting away from "Standard IDE".
It's not overclocked.
I haven't run memtest recently. This PC has been rock solid. No weird phenomena at all running W2K. I could run memtest, or pull all but one stick of RAM and see what happens.

[Telkwa]

Tried running a PCLinuxOS CD Live. It worked fine. None of the hardware detection problems experienced with Dapper. Guess I'll have to learn how to get around in more than one distro
Oh, yeah, I haven't tried Eft. I'll wait for release. Let the braver souls find the bugs.