Re: [MLUG] Athlon motherboards

["Igor Izyumin Jr." <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Sunday 13 January 2002 21:21, Aaron Littich wrote:
> I have a k7s5a motherboard from ECS.  I want to get rid of the fsckin
> thing, it ticks me off immensely.  I was wondering if anyone here has any
> recommendations for athlon motherboards, mainly whether they are fully
> supported under linux and are stable. I'm looking for something fairly
> cheap, and it doesn't have to have raid.
Well, I would NOT recommend Abit.  Their boards are not terribly reliable, 
from what I gather (most of the Abit boards I owned had problems).  Although 
Linux will run on them just fine (it's amazingly stable on bad hardware), 
they have general glitches, such as memory problems.  I heard that Asus 
boards are the most reliable ones, although I have no idea if it's actually 
true, as I never owned one.

> This k7s5a board will run linux, but the problem with it is that whenever
> i change *any* hardware in/out, i have to clear the flash memory.  This
> includes plugging/unplugging a hard drive/cdrom/pci network card/sound
> card/SCSI card.  And it doesn't just clear within 5 or 10 seconds, it
> takes 10 MINUTES or more.  It's not a bad battery, its just a quirky
> motherboard.  And this is not an isolated problem, if you look at the
> forums on ecs's website, you'll see alot of people with the same problem.
Try setting "Force Update ESCD" and possibly the "Plug and Play OS" 
parameters differently.  Forced updates will clear the PNP stuff 
unconditionally, and it should not take 10 minutes.  BTW, it has nothing to 
do with flash, it's the CMOS memory that is screwed up.  It definitely should 
not take that long to clear it - maybe use the jumper to clear it manually?

> Other than the flash bios deal, the motherboard runs very well.  I've
> gotten everything to work, except for the onboard functions (which are
> shit anyways) in linux.
Maybe try to fix the flash deal?
-- 
-- Igor
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