The mobo died in my file server, so I decided to upgrade and actually get a modern motherboard for it, with actual hardware RAID, etc. I bought an ASUS M2A-VM HDMI (I didn't really need the video features, but the price was good).

When I try booting it into Fedora Core 6, the hard drive hangs. Fine, no surprise. It doesn't recognize the hardware (I was going from a Sempron to an Athlon-64 X-2).

The problem is, I can't boot from an installation disk or a rescue disk, either. It gets to the point at which it says:

running sbin/loader

...and then, nothing. Just a flashing cursor. I've let it go for half an hour, with no joy. Is it possible that the motherboard is of such a recent vintage that Anaconda doesn't know how to deal with it? I've never before had a machine that I couldn't boot into Linux from a CD.

[Update after doing a search for "Linux M2A-VM boot problems"]

Apparently I had to disable HPET. It seems to be working now.

[Late night update]

Uh, oh.

"Cannot find any Linux partitions on your drive."

Well, that's why I'm going to RAID 1...

[Wednesday evening update]

Even though I found the old installation on the IDE drive, because X is broken, I decided to try to do an installation on the new dual 250-meg SATAs. Unfortunately, neither the original installation or the install CDs can find the LAN connector. I look at the BIOS, and it says it's enabled. Any ideas?

I can install without it, but the machine won't be of much value if the OS can't talk to the rest of the local network, let alone the Internet.

I avoid hardware RAID like plague. It adds its own failure modes to the failires of component drives, some are vicious and unnecessary. I freely admit that it all started when I worked at Sun Storage back when they actually did engineering. Their leading product at the time was a JBOD. It was 10 times cheaper than its direct competition from EMC (50K vs. 500K to 1M), and was far faster. The main deficiency was that only groups of drives were hot-swappable (but it bought excellent GB/sq.ft). During that time I learned a few important lessons, the chieft of which was that for true redundancy, host software must participate in some way. If it does not, you always have a SPOF. But then, if your host software is RAID aware, why have hardware RAID at all?

Well, it turned out that I just had a loose connection on the IDE connector, so my disk is actually all right along with data. But I now have a nice pair of 250GB SATA drives. I don't have to do hardware RAID, but I would like to do RAID 1 with them. What do you recommend?

Also, I'm a SATA virgin. The motherboard has two red connectors and two black ones. The reds are 1 and 3, and the blacks are 2 and 4. I only got red cables, but I don't know if this means anything. But I plugged the cables into the red connectors, so the drives as installed are 1 and 3. Should I make them 1 and 2 instead?

I have another problem. X is broken, and it's not obvious how to fix it. The install disks can figure it out, but after doing an upgrade, it can't boot into X from the hard drive.

Sorry if won't be a much of any help, Rand. I don't know anything about SATA.

Regarding X, I would save old xorg.conf and run system-config-display --reconfig, then take it from there.

With LAN, you apparently ended with a Realtek, which is a bit sad. I would try to get r8169 to work with it. I think FC-6 should have it...

With LAN, you apparently ended with a Realtek, which is a bit sad. I would try to get r8169 to work with it. I think FC-6 should have it...

Can you elaborate on that comment? Because it's probably my biggest issue at this point...

Are you saying that I have to go back to installing modules from the command line?

When I read the update, I googled for Asus M2A-VM to find its lspci dump. Someone posted one, and it included a Realtek gigabit card. I presumed it was onboard.

Then, I looked at drivers/net, and found that a driver exists called r8169. I looked at its PCI table and it contained an entry superficially matching the one from lspci output (although I cannot be 100% sure because I don't have the numbers, just the strings from the googled result)

Next I figured that FC-6 should've shipped around December 2006 if we take 6 month releases. I checked with "git log" to make sure that r8169 existed at that time. It did (but I didn't verify that it supported your so-called "8111/8168").

So, it should be supported, most likely. Now, why system-config-network is not finding it, that is the question. It can simply be a bug somewhere. Or, your M2A-VM had some changes and used a different Realtek with a new PCI ID which didn't match what the driver knows.

Realtek in general has a dubious reputation, so I said "sad". An Intel gigabit would work better, I suspect.

If everything else fails, they provide a driver on their website, which everyone hates. Installing that is certain to involve the dreaded command line, because you have to build it. But it is certain to include support for all recent chips. Personally, I would not go that route, but I'm mentioning it in the interests of full disclosure.

Personally, I would not go that route, but I'm mentioning it in the interests of full disclosure.

OK, so what route should I go?

FC 7?

Gosh, that Linux is sure powerful. Easy to use, too. Not cryptic at all. And best of all, it is free, just like bl*gsp*t.

Hi,

Toda I've bought the same board. I succeeded to setup CentOS EL5 x64_86. Thee was no problem with ACPI. It booted neatly after the install.

BTW- I am using 320Gb*2 SATA RAID-1 I've enabled BIOS RAID Mode and it detected the raid too. I am not sure if I'd tun of RAID and use LVM RAID instead.