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@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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