On Thu, 2007-03-15 at 11:01 +0800, Mel wrote:
> > 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 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
all other desktop boards that advertize having RAID. The only boards
you see "Real RAID" are high-end workstation boards and server boards. I
would not fault ASRock for this.
See http://linux-ata.org/faq-sata-raid.html
It comes down to doing research as to what hardware is supported in your
distrobution of choice before buying the hardware. If you are using a
fairly cutting edge distro like Fedora, OpenSuSE or Ubutu and the
chipset is at least a year or so old your probably OK, but if you want
the latest wizz-bang chipset your probably not going to be happy trying
to install linux on it.
My personal preference is usually Gigabyte & ASRock for budget boards
and Tyan & ASUS for mid to upper range desktop boards.
Regards,
Paul Berger
_______________________________________________
CentOS mailing list
CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
