hdw, may be somewhat OT

[Mark Jarvis]

Thanks, Alan, that sounds like good advice.

-mj-

Alan Pratt wrote:

> Mark,
> 
> I picked up one to the cheapie ECS boards (RS482) along with an AMD
> 3700+. Actually, it came with the chip. I had a broken ASUS A8N-SLI
> being RMA'd, so I wasn't too concerned about the MB. I did gave the MB
> a try while waiting for the replacement ASUS, though, and had a
> similar experience to yours. I couldn't (easily) get any of my 'nix
> distibutions to load or setup. I was able to get WinXP to run without
> too much trouble.
> 
> Once the ASUS board showed up, I pulled the ECS board and installed
> the ASUS... every 'nix I had ran perfectly and setup fine. (FC4,
> Suse10, Ubuntu 5.10, Debian 3.1). My opinion is that the ECS boards
> are nice an cheap - and for motherboards, you get what you pay for.
> The Sermpron's are OK, but plan on a few extra bucks for an Abit,
> ASUS, or another one of the mid-tier boards.
> 
> - Alan (Pratt - not THE Alan)
> 
> 
> 
> On 3/6/06, Mark Jarvis <mark.jarvis at pvmail.maricopa.edu> wrote:
> 
>>First, sad story: A month or so ago I bought one of those ECS Nforce3-A
>>motherboard/Sempron 3100+ specials at Fry's. I was basically unable to
>>get it to boot from my existing Linux & Windows installations. After
>>fighting for a (hellish) week trying to find a way to force booting from
>>the existing installations, I finally gave up and re-did all OS
>>installations. Thank goodness most of my data was in a separate data
>>partition and remained pretty much OK. (To add to my confusion, I could
>>use a Windows multi-boot diskette to start the boot, using its boot.ini
>>to transfer to an installation, then complete a windows boot as usual. I
>>could then see all drives & windows usable partitions, so the disks were
>>see-able, just not bootable!) It didn't help that a diskette drive and
>>power supply died during that time and that half of a pair of 512MB 3200
>>memory sticks was DOA.  !@#$%^&*!
>>
>>OK, I'm now up & running,
>>
>>When Linux kernels started to get too big to fit on a diskette, I was
>>relieved to discover Smart Boot Manager and have used it extensively at
>>home and at school to boot into any available Windows or Linux
>>partition. BUT--SBM no longer works on my machine! It doesn't even
>>display the partitions! Obviously, there is some sort of horrible
>>mobo/HD interaction at work here.
>>
>>Has anyone else bought one of those ECS specials? What was your experience?
>>
>>I was hoping that my problems were due to my HDs. They're biggish--two
>>120s and a 160, but not really all THAT big. Since Fry's has the same
>>offer on again, I was thinking of upgrading my wife's box, hoping that
>>her smaller, older disks--two Maxtor 80s--would not be a problem. That
>>SBM thing, however, really bothers me.
>>
>>Any comments, hints, experiences, and/or suggestions gratefully received.
>>
>>-mj-
>>
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