My troubles installing LINUX

[rhofland at gis.net (Randall Hofland)]

Mike;

    Interesting insight into my boards and it may be the answer to my
problems with the Mandrake 7 distribution, although I am using AGP video
cards. I have actually discovered that the primary problem with the Dual Boot
setup is that NT trashes my LILO files while installing. I also suspect that
I need to delete the existing LILO entirely while building the NT install and
then reinstall it when NT is completely installed (I can do this fairly
easily in SuSE 6.3 with YaST v.1). I can selectively boot up the system
either on the CD for system building or the hard drives as needed and where
LILO resides (I use the Main Boot Record). The strange thing is that the
systems run quite well by themselves but crash each other when installed
together.
    Now that I know where my problems are, I think I can now get all of my
servers up and running without too much more trouble. I am quite impressed
with the boards once I have the software up and running. I'll keep the
Discuss Group posted.

Randy Hofland



Mike Bilow wrote:

> The Supermicro P6DLS is a rather eccentric motherboard, to say the least.
> It has a few, well, "quirks," especially when it gets too near the Linux
> Adaptec drivers.
>
> First of all, running the bus at 75 MHz may well cause trouble.  I have
> never tried this, but it would be one of the first things I would look at.
>
> Second, the most likely source of trouble on the P6DLS is -- get this --
> PCI card plug order.  Some of the PCI slots have different capabilities
> from each other, so often rearranging the cards will solve mysterious
> problems, especially with video.  Often, if you are using a PCI video
> card, it helps to put it into either the slot closest to or futhest from
> the power supply.  Both bus mastering and resource allocation order will
> be changed.  When you see funny video things on the P6DLS, PCI card order
> is the leading suspect.  We once had a Number Nine PCI video card that
> would only work in one slot if there was a 3C905 Ethernet card present.
>
> Third, you absolutely must make sure that your Linux kernel is compiled
> with IO-APIC support or this motherboard is not going to work.  You should
> test by booting Linux with SMP disabled to see if you have any different
> behavior; do this by specifying "nosmp" to Lilo when prompted.
>
> -- Mike
>
> On Sat, 18 Mar 2000, Randall Hofland wrote:
>
> > FYI Update on LINUX installs;
> >
> >     I was able to fully install Mandrake 7 to the hard drive of my
> > server box (Supermicro P6DLS boards with dual Celeron @ 525 MHz, 128 Mb
> > DIMMs CAS L2) and then exit the install and reboot. The machine freezes
> > with a screen that is blank except for a "g" at the bottom left. I have
> > not been able to configure X because of issues with using an old PS2 VGA
> > monitor despite setting the X configurations within the acceptable range
> > (but I don't really need X on the server anyways). Unlike my install
> > issues with SuSE where it usually does not get through LILO, this freeze
> > is beyond the LILO boot.
> >     I am now suspecting a hardware issue on the motherboards but can't
> > figure out what can be the problem. The SCSI drive is properly
> > configured as a boot device in Bios and the Adaptec drivers for the on
> > board UW-SCSI seem to boot up via the BIOS installation as well. I have
> > not discovered any obvious points of contention during my explorations
> > of the BIOS and SCSI utilities. My only real concern is that either my
> > running the bus at 75 rather than 66 MHz causes some data errors
> > (unlikely since I have have already tried loading SuSE at the 66MHz
> > setting) or that the DIMMs have some sort of configuration problem (BIOS
> > is set to autodetect but I have also tried manually setting to CAS L2 or
> > L3).The one thing I have not done with this board (but did with another
> > problem child) was to update the BIOS to detect faster CPU speeds.
> >     This is truely making me crazy. Please give me some idea what I need
> > to look for.
> >
> > Thanks!

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