MSI RS480M2-IL Athlon 64 Motherboard mini-review
Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 17 Mar 2005 19:32:08 GMT
The parts for my latest home PC arrived yesterday afternoon and Gabe and I spent a couple hours assembling them into a workable system. It’s amazing how much help a 4-year-old can provide, even around delicate PC parts. I now have a working Athlon 64 3000+ (S939) system with 1 GB of ram and a reasonably large amount of disk space sitting on my desk. I’m going to be using this for Xen testing, but I’ll write more about that later. For now, I want to concentrate on the hardware.
I went out on a limb a bit when ordering this system, because the motherboard I picked, MSI’s RS480M2-IL, is the first motherboard on the market with ATI’s first Athlon 64 chipset (the Radeon Xpress 200), and Google doesn’t give any clear Linux success stories for the motherboard or chipset. However, this is the only socket 939 board that I could find with on-board video, and I really like on-board video for servers. It was also quite a bit cheaper then buying a comparable board plus an AGP video card. A bit of poking around suggested that the SATA ports might be trouble, and it was unclear how well X supports the on-board video, but I don’t really care about either of those for this system. The parallel IDE ports and Ethernet are the only really important parts for me.
So, after installing all of the hardware, I burned a new Ubuntu install CD and gave it a spin. It booted up okay, found the network, found the IDE hard drives, and installed without any serious problems. Ubuntu’s install CD doesn’t seem to have a driver for ATI’s IDE chipset, so I was stuck in slow PIO mode, but it still worked. Once the install finished, I rebooted and watched Ubuntu try to add all of Gnome and OpenOffice to my nice little server system–yikes. After stopping that, I installed gcc, downloaded the source for Linux 2.6.11.4, and build a new kernel.
After booting the new kernel, almost everything looks okay. Here are the drivers needed for this hardware:
- IDE: ATI IXP (in stock 2.6.11)
- SATA: libata’s sata_sil driver detects 4 SATA ports. I have no SATA drives to use for testing, though.
- Ethernet: 8193too (in stock 2.6.11)
- IEEE1394/firewire: OHCI1394 (in stock 2.6.11). Only lightly tested, but able to mount disks connected to FW DVD burner.
- USB: EHCI (8 ports USB 2.0)/OHCI (4 ports USB 1.1). Looks okay, but untested.
I’m currently fighting two problems:
- Massive clock skew–the system clock is running twice as fast as it should. This is usually a power-management issue or a BIOS bug. A lot of new systems suffer from this, and it shouldn’t take too long to fix.
- The system won’t reboot cleanly. Linux shuts down okay, but the system hangs and I need to hit ‘reset’ before it’ll reboot. This is probably related to problem #1.
Update (3/18/2005): Disabling the APIC fixed the clock problem, but not the reboot problem. I tried changing a number of power management settings without success. Most likely, the APIC will start working with a future BIOS revision. This problem seems to be preventing me from booting Xen right now, but that’ll probably be fixed by a new version of Xen in the fairly short term.
Did you need to do anything special in building the new kernel in amd64? I’ve installed debian on the same system.
I haven’t tried the board in 64-bit mode. I need to use this system for testing Xen in 32-bit mode, so I’m sticking to 32-bit code for now. Later this year, Xen will probably have support for mixed 32- and 64-bit environments, but for now 32 is okay for me.
Besides, I didn’t think that Debian was currently all that great of a choice for 64-bit systems–when you install the amd64 packages on the box, you don’t (yet) get 32-bit libraries, so it’s not really 32-bit compatible. It’s supposed to change sooner or later, but I didn’t think it’d changed yet. I might have missed something, though.
hmm, and what about vga and onboad sound/spdif?
I haven’t tested either the sound or the onboard video (except for text mode). I have no idea if they work or not.
You probably know this by now but there is a recall of boards that have a boot problem… I’d put the link here but your blog thinks it is spam.
George mailed me the link: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20923
I’ve had some serious issues with installing linux on this motherboard.
I tried to boot Mandrake 10.1 which was already installed on the harddrive, and it failed at the init stage.. couldn’t mount the partitions. An attempt to re-install Mandrake 10.1 resulted in the IDE not being recognized. I then tried Mandrake 9.2.1 and that at least recognized the drive and was able to re-partition and start formatting it, but the format eventually died (spitting out a weird message about “base system not existing”).
So, I saw this article about installing Ubuntu and decided to give that a try. As with the original author’s experience, the Ubuntu install mostly worked. GDM would not start, however. XFree86 incorrectly auto-detected the video as an ATI Mach and so failed. I went in and manually forced it to use Standard VGA and was able to at least get some minimal video.
This seems to be a problem child for now, at least til some drivers become available. I primarily intend to use this system as a game server at the moment, though, so the current Ubuntu install may work for the intermediate future.
If anyone has any bleeding-edge distribution you think I should try, let me know…
I have also had plenty of problems with this board. My setup includes the rs480m2-il + amd64 3200+ + 1gb ram + nvidia 6600 pci-e + sony dvd rw inside an antec aria case.
First I tried Ubunto 64bit latest version. I could not get this to install. The install hangs early tring to get the frame buffer or something similar.
Suse 64bit also hangs during install but gets a bit further. It hangs when trying to determine the hardware.
Suse 32bit gets much further reaching the graphical installer. The installation hangs shortly after formatting the partitions.
Mandrake 10.1 64bit does not see the cd-rom (which is a problem on some other systems too). I tried 2 other cd-rom drives with the same issue.
Mandrake 9.1 32bit installs but could not connect to the network. This is strange because the router can see the pc and the eth0 status on the pc is fine - like it they can see each other but cannot communicate any data.
Vida Linux 64bit installs but when rebooting says it cannot find hda or hdc (the dvd). It then continues and claims to find the os on hdg. However, since the boot was installed on hda (during the Vida install process) it says it cannot find a boot and gives me a prompt. Unfortunately the keyboard is disabled so there is not much I can do.
Gentoo 64bit (in my case) requires the network to install. However, this suffers from exactly the same network problem as Mandrake 9.1. During the installation Gentoo complains that something might be hogging irqs.
Windows2000 installs but also suffers from the aforementioned network problem.
SimplyMepis. This installs (though I initially had some hangs formatting partitions that appear to have gone away possibly because of bios setup changes) and the network works fine - no problems. I do not understand this. It’s great I just do not understand how SimplyMepis gets the network to work. It should be said that it does complain that it cannot access two PCI addresses on startup though. Also SimplyMepis is only 32bit.
I have not been able to get the sound card working yet - it is lower on my list of prorities though. The graphics card is working fine.
Has anyone else seen a similar network issue? Originally the lan shared irqs with usb but I have disabled the com and parellel ports and now the lan is not sharing its irqs. This makes no difference. A separate PCI lan card has exactly the same problem - on everything except SimplyMepis also.
I have upgraded the Bios to v3.3 just it case it helped - but as expected it did not.
Allan, I may have one possibly helpful suggestion.
I just installed Mandrake 10.2 RC2 and I had network issues as well. My syslog contained various messages about transmit timeouts. I did some googling and saw that another person with the same error messages got things working by passing “noapic” to the kernel.
In my case I edited lilo.conf to add “noapic” to the kernel parameters, typed “lilo” to save it, rebooted, and the network suddenly worked perfectly (I can’t remember if it was also necessary to disable APIC in the BIOS, but I don’t think it was).
However, after much fiddling, I still have two remaining problems: 1) when I reboot the system, linux shuts down but fails to reboot and 2) my USB mouse/keyboard KVM does not work at all.
I’m going to play with Gentoo a little bit, but if that doesn’t work out well I’ll probably stick with the Mandrake 10.2 RC2 for now… at least I can get some use out of the machine with it.
Yeah, noapic seems to be required right now. I think this is a BIOS issue, not really a kernel issue, but I haven’t tracked things done all the way. Most likely, one or more of the BIOS’s configuration tables is wrong, and Linux is unhappy.
I don’t know about the KVM switch problem, but I absolutely have reboot issues as well. After telling Linux to reboot, the system shuts down but then locks up hard. Reset works, but the soft-power-off button doesn’t–if I want to shut it down, then I need to either hold down the power button for 4 seconds or pull the plug.
Well I played with Gentoo for a while. What a freakin pain in the ass that distro is. Yes, I know how to manually create partitions and manually set up all of my networking files… but does that mean I want to actually do it manually??? Heck no. I spent two hours on the install and then realized that if this was the effort I’d have to go through in the future each time I get new hardware, I wanted nothing of it. The basic idea of the distro is cool, but it needs a MUCH better installer.
Anyway, after passing in “noapic” to the Debian installer, Sarge RC3 worked fine for me with this mobo. Debian seems slow to me but maybe I just haven’t gotten used to it yet.
I may stick with it on this machine though because it works with my USB mouse/keyboard and it reboots properly (important for me since I travel a lot and sometimes need to remotely reboot).
Thanks Chris and Scott.
I re-tried Ubuntu amd64 4.10 with noapi, nolapic and acpi=off and low and behold it installed perfectly with no network problems. The sound did not work though. So, making use of the newly discovered (for me) Synaptic package management tool I upgraded to the latest Ubuntu release (hoary). To my delight not only did the upgrade succeed but now I have sound! I am a fully converted Ubuntu fan.
However, there is one thing that I still cannot do and I am wondering if anyone has had the same problem. With both Simply Mepis and Ubuntu (the only two successful installs) hdparm will not allow me to enable dma. I get this:
HDIOSETDMA failed: Operation not permitted
I am experiencing pretty poor system performance when there is heavy disk activity and was hoping that I could cure the problem by enabling dma.
Also hdparm -i does not label any of the modes as currently active when using hdparm -i which is puzzling (to me anyway).
Most likely, the kernel is built without support for ATI’s IDE chips. Take a look at the Ubuntu kernel’s .config file and see if the ATI IDE chipset support is turned on. There’s only one ATI IDE line, so it shouldn’t be hard to miss.
The latest Gentoo Universal Live CD installs well without network requirement. Usb Mouse, Usb keyboard, ethernet working well. Same reboot, apic, dma problems as others. Video thru vesa works. Don’t know about sound yet.
the new kanotix 2005.02 seems to work quite well over here. network working and dma working have not tried a hdinstall yet as i have not got a spare hd atm i loaded the whole image to ram with the toram boot option.(u got to have 1gig to do so though) its plenty fast and i dont have to listen to the damned cdrom all the time.
give it a spinn kde 3.4 seems nice as well
cheers mats
re: dma
Well the kernel config option that I think probably refers to the ATI chipset is: CONFIGBLKDEV_ATIIXP (?) which is set to m so it should work. Is this the right config setting?
Anyway cached reads from hda are fine but buffered read performance is abismal at arouund 2.8 MB/sec.
The hdparm setting is: /dev/hda: multcount = 16 (on) IO_support = 1 (32-bit) unmaskirq = 0 (off) using_dma = 0 (off) keepsettings = 0 (off) readonly = 0 (off) readahead = 256 (on) geometry = 65535/16/63, sectors = 81964302336, start = 0
No current active mode. When I disable UDMA in the Bios I get mdma2 as the active mode but this does not help performance.
I have tried another hard drive and even changing the cable to no avail. If the kernel config is ok then I am thinking this might be a motherboard issue.
I am not a hardware or linux expert and would appreciate any ideas or opinions. Thanks.
It’s compiled as a module? Ah, that’s probably the issue–the driver module isn’t loaded. Try running ‘modprobe atiixp’ as root.
Thanks again Scott for your help. However, before I read your reply I thought I would upgrade the kernel from 2.6.10 to 2.6.11. This upgrade solved the problem! Maybe the configuration is slightly different or something - I have not checked. I guess I should have followed your example and done this much earlier - someday I will learn.
Anyway I now have decent hard drive performance at last :-)) And by the looks of it there are no motherboard problems.
I just got one of these motherboards a week ago.
With the apic enabled, I can’t reboot. With the apic disabled, kernel locks up while identifying the serial ata stuff on bootup.
I have sound enabled, but I haven’t hooked up speakers yet.
hdparm apparently doesn’t work well with sata hard drives.
are the APIC problems due to a firmware problem, or a kernel problem? Who should I be talking to to let them know that I think this is a problem?
Has anyone gotten accelerated video with the ati-drivers working? I’ve had no luck.
So basically you guys are saying this is a shitty board for running Linux?
I have installed Suse 9.3 and also Fedora Core 4 - test 2 on this motherboard. Both seem to work OK excpet for the fact that the system clock runs twice as fast as the hardware clock. I wanted to use this computer for my new web server. Any thoughts on the clock problem. I am basically an application software developer and I do not know very much about the Linux kernel or hardware. So how do I disable APIC? I have not found anything in my bios settings that looks like APIC.
Add ‘noapic’ to the kernel command line. If you’re using grub, then you can usually find grub’s config file in /boot/grub/menu.lst; look for the first line that starts with ‘kernel’ and add ‘noapic’ to the end of the line. For lilo, edit /etc/lilo.conf and look the the first line that starts with ‘append’.
Alternately, you can do this at boot time; with grub press ‘e’ to edit the boot parameters.
Disabling APIC did fix the clock problem; however, now the network is extremley slow. Thanks for the tip on how to do this.
Has anyone determined whether this is a kernel problem or a bios problem on the motherboard?
I don’t have network speed issues; how slow is it? What shows up in /proc/interrupts?
I have been playing with this board for a couple of weeks. I have a SATA drive. I too, have problems with 2x clock skew. If I boot with noapic or nolapic, the system just hangs, something to do with the SATA drive from what I understand.
I attempted a Gentoo install (what a beast!) but could never get it to reboot… From what I hear from a Gentoo enthusiast, the directions are incorrect. I then installed FC4 test2 which went pretty well except for the clock skew noted here as well as other places.
After applying Sunday’s (4/24/2005) FC4 test2 rawhide update, my system became unstable. In fact, my system has become more unstable with each succeeding rawhide update that I can no longer use it. I may just reinstall FC4 test2 again and not update it.
Oddly enough, the kanotix release noted above works fine… The clock does not skew either. It is not robust enough for me to use on a permanent basis, but does work.
Hopefully the kernel people get the clock skew problem fixed, though I have not seen any chatter about it anywhere.
I have finally got FC4test2 up and running. It took me a couple downloads to realize that they were coming down fine and I was verifying them with md5 and not SHA1SUM (when did that change). I write this because there may be another person in the same boat. Other things have changed a lot since RH9 (like Xfree to X.org). I have been away from Linux for too long. Also, my company decided to not release SI for Linux. So I could not get into it on a daily basis.
I too have run into the system clock issue. Hopefully it will get fixed. I ran into the reboot issue also. Does anyone know about this? Maybe talked to MSI or have any new info? The system will not reboot with FC4Test2. I am running the 3.3 bios for the board.
I am considering buying this board because it’s the only Socket 939 microatx board I can find. Do you Linux guru’s out there believe that these Linux issues may be solved soon? Or at least in the near future?
In the short term (1-2 months), this board will probably be okay for you if you’re looking for a server board, but I don’t think I can really recommend it for desktop use. People have been able to get it to work, but there’s a lot of tweaking required.
Longer-term, the problems should get fixed, but the first few months will be a pain.
Hi, I’m considering to buy a board with the same ATI northbridge and southbridge combination, but I’m concerned about the driver support, in particular about the SB400 SATA support. Are you sure the driver supporting it is sata_sil? I couldn’t find any information whether the MSI motherboard has a discrete SII SATA chipset or in fact the southbridge has a compatible chipset integrated.
Can you post the output of ‘lspci -v’? If the support is good enough I’ll buy it and share any tweaks I find with you guys.
Thanks in advance.
Here is the output from ‘lspci -v’ on my system. Warning: I’m running FreeBSD/amd64, not Linux: root@kg-quiet# uname -a FreeBSD kg-quiet.kg4.no 5.4-STABLE FreeBSD 5.4-STABLE #2: Tue May 3 22:40:03 CEST 2005 root@kg-quiet.kg4.no:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/QUIET amd64
‘lspci -v’ says: 00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 5950 Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 7141 Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64 I/O ports at [disabled] Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 5a3f (prog-if 00 [Normal decode]) Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 99 Bus: primary=00, secondary=01, subordinate=01, sec-latency=68 I/O behind bridge: 0000e000-0000efff Memory behind bridge: fdd00000-fddfffff Prefetchable memory behind bridge: 00000000d0000000-00000000dff00000 Capabilities: [44] #08 [a803] Capabilities: [b0] #0d [0000]
00:11.0 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc ATI 437A Serial ATA Controller (prog-if 8f [Master Se cP SecO PriP PriO]) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 7141 Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 11 I/O ports at fe00 I/O ports at fd00 I/O ports at fc00 I/O ports at fb00 I/O ports at fa00 Memory at fe02f000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 2 Capabilities: [50] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit- Queue=0/0 Enable-
00:12.0 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc ATI 4379 Serial ATA Controller (prog-if 8f [Master Se cP SecO PriP PriO]) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 7141 Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 10 I/O ports at f900 I/O ports at f800 I/O ports at f700 I/O ports at f600 I/O ports at f500 Memory at fe02e000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 2 Capabilities: [50] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit- Queue=0/0 Enable-
00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4374 (prog-if 10 [OHCI]) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 7141 Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 10 Memory at fe02d000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) Capabilities: [d0] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit- Queue=0/0 Enable-
00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4375 (prog-if 10 [OHCI]) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 7141 Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 10 Memory at fe02c000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) Capabilities: [d0] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit- Queue=0/0 Enable-
00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4373 (prog-if 20 [EHCI]) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 7141 Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 10 Memory at fe02b000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 2 Capabilities: [d0] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit- Queue=0/0 Enable-
00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc ATI SMBus (rev 04) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 7141 Flags: 66Mhz, medium devsel I/O ports at 0400 Memory at fe02a000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) Capabilities: [b0] #08 [a802]
00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller ATI (prog-if 8a [Master SecP PriP]) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 7141 Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 255 I/O ports at I/O ports at I/O ports at I/O ports at I/O ports at f300 Capabilities: [70] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit- Queue=0/0 Enable-
00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4377 Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 7141 Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 0
00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4371 (prog-if 01 [Subtractive decode]) Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64 Bus: primary=00, secondary=02, subordinate=02, sec-latency=32 I/O behind bridge: 0000d000-0000dfff Memory behind bridge: fdc00000-fdcfffff Prefetchable memory behind bridge: fde00000-fdefffff
00:14.5 Multimedia audio controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4370 Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 0080 Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, slow devsel, latency 64, IRQ 3 Memory at fe029000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) Capabilities: [40] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit- Queue=0/0 Enable-
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration Flags: fast devsel Capabilities: [80] #08 [2101]
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map Flags: fast devsel
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller Flags: fast devsel
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control Flags: fast devsel
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 5954 (prog-if 00 [VGA]) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 7141 Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 3 Memory at d0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) I/O ports at ef00 Memory at fddf0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2
02:03.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 093c Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 5 I/O ports at df00 Memory at fdcff000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2
02:04.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. IEEE 1394 Host Controller (rev 80) (prog-if 10 [OHCI]) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 093d Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 11 Memory at fdcfe000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) I/O ports at de00 Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2
Hope this helps anyone.
just got this board, having similar problems where usb kvm doesn’t work (power only comes on briefly it seems) and also have POST-ing problem where it randomly stalls on rebooting after the cpu identification and before memory-check/ide detection.
using winxp sp2 but this problem occurs before i get into an os-specific boot process.
wish i knew this before i bought the board, going nuts trying to isolate problem, trying ram first but currently trolling msi forums: http://forum.msi.com.tw and ars technica for advice
rei–if the board won’t POST, then that’s usually a good indication that you’re looking at broken hardware. Most likely it’s a bad motherboard, but it could be the CPU, memory, power supply, or practically anything else that’s plugged into it. I had a friend with a bad PC that he couldn’t fix, even after swapping every single component in the case out for new parts. It turned out that his keyboard was broken, and was grounding something and screwing up the rest of the system.
Anyway, I’d start by RMAing the motherboard; I’d give that about a 60% chance of fixing your problem.
I’m having similar hells with this board. It is not good for linux. it is dubious whether it would be a good choice for windows.
This thread has a few non-linux-specific comments: http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=29&threadid=1557421&enterthread=y A thread on the MSI boards mentioned a need to clear the bios whenever changing hardware.
It is relevant that many other companies haven’t released the RS480 boards they have in their product list.
It is also relevant, i think, that MSI do not have this board (or any other socket-939) in their knowledge base query. ATI likewise, you seemingly cannot register that you own this product, in order to get any support, let alone linux support.
Mail to ATI about which drivers are supposed to be used for linux, gets auto-replied with a note ditecting you to linux/X documentation sites that do not mention the chipset.
In the latest CVS snapshot of xorg, 6.8.99.5 the radeon driver half works. X starts and the mouse pointer looks fine and works, but the pictures below are all smeared across the screen almost like a refresh rate problem.
lspci doesn’t recognise the chipset, or the graphics. I haven’t tried kernels later than 2.6.11-gentoo-r7. I’ll give 2.6.12_rc4 a go, justfor “fun”
I still say; if you want a desktop install, go with Kanotix for this motherboard atm , its not that unstable (not for a server though), and has nice apps, and lots of nice “special” stuff like captiveNTFS, and lots of wlan drivers. ..But beware of apt-get dist-upgrade…
…other stuff that works is just around the corner as well, i guess…
Anonymous new to linux person: People have trouble getting this motherboard to work with windows.
Differences between linux and windows:
With linux, there are (basically) no graphics drivers. I got mail back from ATI saying they will not provide the drivers, they are leaving that to MSI. which seemingly means ATI provide NONE of the advertised linux support on which i bought the board. You can use the “vesa” driver in X. It will be poor. I can’t get it to do 1280x1024 with vesa, and the whole system often crashes when switching X sessions or to console. Your board might work better than mine, the boards’ bugginess has a fairly random distributions, some people’s work.
In linux there’s a clock problem, which may be due to the kernel not knowing the chipset, and in windows is probably fixed by the supplied MB drivers. To fix it in linux, you seemingly have to boot without APIC, which as someone noted above, may mean sata won’t work.
There’s power management stuff in linux that may help the board’s bugginess on shutdown. Since no-one knows what the problem is caused by, adjustments here to the kernel are sort of random. I found the problem lessened when i disabled the ACPI Processor P-States driver Location:
x -> Power management options
x -> CPU Frequency scaling
This is a bad board, it has NO linux support unlike advertised, and not at all a good choice for anyone new to linux.
The foxconn nforce4 micro-atx socket 939 board is likely to be a much better option in linux. (though it may still have memory issues, at least it can set the timings) Foxconn has no onboard graphics, but then, no 2d drivers for the ATI yet, and no-one knows about 3d drivers, ATI seemingly won’t say, so you’re going to have to buy a graphics card anyway.
For using this board for anything, it might ease your pain if you use low performance RAM, since it has trouble with high performance. See the MSI forums.
Anonymous new-to-linux This is not a good board under any OS.
This is not the place to ask for a general install guide, and i can’t tell you anything about mepis.
Differences with this board to a normal linux install:
Disabling the ” ACPI Processor P-States driver” in kernel helped me with the board’s shutdown/reboot issue. If you don’t have this problem in windows, it will probably not effect you in linux either.
There are no good graphics drivers, and it seems ATI won’t provide them. You can set X to use the vesa or vga drivers, but they will be poor. This means you will have to buy a video card. I suggest an nvidia one.
If you haven’t bought the board yet, consider a foxconn nforce4 micro-atx board instead (about the only other socket 939 micro-atx on the market). No onboard video, but if you have to buy one anyway that’s no big loss.
I can’t help with SATA issues.
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I can’t do 1280x1024 with vesa and the onboard graphics, anyone else have this problem?
Please pardon the posting about the same thing twice. i thought the first one failed, reloaded the page it wasn’t here, so re-wrote it.
Anonymous, Suggestion You tried linux, linux, and linux, on this board, and no time did linux work to your satisfaction. Perhaps you would have been better spending your time trying only one linux, and learning what you needed to do to get it to work.
Any linux install boot disc i’ve seen lets you pass needed kernel options, noapic for example. Any linux i’ve seen expects you will be compiling your own kernel to suit your hardware needs.
Most of this board’s problems seem to exist for windows, too. That it works fine for you in XP suggests it will also work now for you, if crippled by no support, in linux. And it will work just as fine when ATI provide a kernel patch for the chipset, (and a video driver).
Hello ,
I’m considering to build up system with AMD64 and here mentioned MB “MSI RS480M2-IL”. Does anybody know if this board fits to Antec’s Aria case ? screws holes? backplane ? connectors compatibility ? Any other suggestion for uATX with Antecs Aria ? I plan to run Kanotix and Win XP. LAN and FW is required.
Can anyone post some details around the process of installing using a distro with a kernel older than 2.6.11 onto an IDE disk, recompiling a new 2.6.11 kernel that can read the sata drives, and then switching over to the sata drive? I think I’m 98% there, but am stuck on an error message.
Here’s an overview of my process:
Connect 2 SATA drives and 1 IDE drive
Configure BIOS to boot the IDE first
Boot an Ubuntu 5.04 install CD
Install Ubuntu onto the IDE drive (uses kernel 2.6.10-5). I’m using a single partition for the filesystem and another one for swap.
Do the necessary debian routine to get up to a 2.6.11 kernel. Before I build the new kernel, I do a:
Format the partitions on the SATA drive I want to run off of eventually
Set up the file systems on the new drive
Copy over the files as such:
Fix a few files so they know to use the sata drive:
(hd0) /dev/sdb (hd1) /dev/sda EOF # cp /boot/grub/device.map /mnt/fsroot/boot/grub/device.map # grub-install –root-directory=/mnt/fsroot –no-floppy /dev/sdb
Then I power off, remove the IDE drive, boot up.
Grub loads correctly and loads the kernel, but the kernel panics. The error messages are:
Anyone have a better process? Anyone know what I’m missing?
Thanks!
Hello,
I want to all this issues. I past two weeks to figure out what was causing the problem with Linux Fedora 3. For me I disable APIC and USB and the BIOS and everything seems to be fine. Is there any body can tell me how to make USB working without hang the system at the boot time
Thank you
Hello,
I went to all this issues. I past two weeks to figure out what was causing the problem with Linux Fedora 3. For me I disable APIC and USB and the BIOS and everything seems to be fine. Is there any body can tell me how to make USB working without hang the system at the boot time
Thank you
Good news, ATI have just released Linux drivers for Radeon Xpress 200: http://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&folderID=27”;>http://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&folderID=27
Direct link: http://support.ati.com/ics/support/KBAnswer.asp?questionID=19511
To Pascal Wolfe:
USB may work, but your device hatls the system. I have no problem with my usb (external usb dvd drive). However if i insert my iPod shuffle at boot time the system halts. So try disable USB for booting, or unplug all your usb devies while booting.
kr. ld (who have problems with the clock skew and SATA - using noapic to the kernel apparantly blocks my system from booting my raid-sata setup)
Hey gang. I too have been fighting on and off with this board. The kernel list has a totally sweet kernel patch posted by Chris Wing to solve the problem.
Apply that and add “timerhack” to your kernel parameters.
I have recompiled the kernel only about 40 times and played with the bios twice as many. This seems to work, however the patch is only for 64-bit. But, if you change the x86_64 to i386 in the patch header, I think it’ll work as the function is the same but the lines may be off.
Currently, I am running Gentoo with vanilla kernel 2.6.11.10 in 64-bit.
Whenever I disable the IO-APIC I get no control over my hardware, so its my belief that there is no XT-PIC to route the interrupts (irqs) when it is disabled. This totally ruins important things like networking.
This will probably help many of you with hardware not being recognized errors. I have been running KDE on my NVidia 6600GTOC at 1280x1024 with no problems with the patch, without it is totally unreliable, which means something must be dependant on accurate timing in the driver.
For the uninitiated linux kernel hackers: Essentially the timer is doubled because the regular timer emits its interrupt, but the IO-APIC also emits it interrupt, so timer is effectively doubled. The patch just cuts out setting up the IO-APIC timer if “timerhack” is a kernel parameter.
Many thanks to Chris Wing for his hard work!!!
The patch by Chris Wing:
Hi Guys,
Been following this page with utmost interest since I got the MSI RS480M2-IL board a couple of months back. Was thrilled to find Philipp’s post about the release of ATI drivers for the Xpress 200. However, direct rendering isn’t working and I get this when I try to compile the kernel module :
assuming new VMA API since we do have kernel 2.6.x… doing Makefile based build for kernel 2.6.x and higher make -C /lib/modules/kernel-2.6.11-1.1286FC4/build SUBDIRS=/lib/modules/fglrx/buildmod/2.6.x modules make[1]: Entering directory
/usr/src/linux-headers-kernel-2.6.11-1.1286_FC4' CC [M] /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/nvidia-agp.o /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/nvidia-agp.c:57: error: static declaration of '__fgl_agp_try_unsupported' follows non-static declaration /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/agp_backend.h:92: error: previous declaration of '__fgl_agp_try_unsupported' was here make[2]: *** [/lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/nvidia-agp.o] Fout 1 make[1]: *** [_module_/lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x] Fout 2 make[1]: Leaving directory/usr/src/linux-headers-kernel-2.6.11-1.1286_FC4’ make: * [kmod_build] Fout 2 build failed with return value 2Am using FC4 Test 3. (that’s gcc 4)
Someone told me that this was in all probability a gcc error. I’ve tried various workarounds eg. uninstalling gcc 4 and trying to compile with gcc32 (wherein it complains that my kernel was built with gcc 4, and hence this has to be too) but to no avail.
The driver did solve some problems over the vesa driver (which I had been forced to use earlier) - like tvtime runs perfectly and doesn’t complain of missing YUV overlays in the graphics card etc.
Do any of you know a way out of this build error? It would be really nice to put an end to my sleepless nights. :-) Thanks
PJ: Myself and others are using it in an Antec Aria case. It fits fine. The Antec aria won’t be what stops it working.
All that work for 10% more FPS over software 3d with an external card. for washed out colours, and 64M less RAM.
Um, i dunno if there’s something i should maybe have in xorg.conf or something, to make the RS480 actually move above a crawl, but, from what i see in glxgears, the hardware accelleraton is only 10% faster than software. Maybe if the fglrxconfig program as well as the driver recognised the chipset, it could do the right switches.
I walked away for a few hours, leaving glxgears running. Had trouble getting the monitor back when i returned..
Found this in glxgears log: 1948 frames in 333.0 seconds = 5.850 FPS about a minute later 4278 frames in 34.0 seconds = 125.824 FPS
This in dmesg warning: many lost ticks. Your time source seems to be instable or some driver is hogging interupts rip 0x2aaaabbc2994
And some APIC error on CPU0: 40(40)
Maybe that patch is a problem? Maybe i need to read that kernel thread more?
At boot i get Using local APIC NMI watchdog using perfctr0 ..MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC failed. timer doesn’t work through the IO-APIC - disabling NMI Watchdog! works. Using local APIC timer interrupts.
then a bit later: input: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard on isa0060/serio0 Losing some ticks… checking if CPU frequency changed. Uhhuh. NMI received for unknown reason 3d. Dazed and confused, but trying to continue Do you have a strange power saving mode enabled? input: ImExPS/2 Generic Explorer Mouse on isa0060/serio1
All a bit weird. Anyone else on what timerhack should/shouldn’t do or anything?
Hi.
I know that everybody seems to be having some problems with this board, what with time, or sound, or whatnot.
I’d just like to tell you all that I think you’re looking in the wrong place to fix all these problems.
My board shuts down normally, reboots normally, has no problems with time, no problems with graphics (excepting that it’s VESA, not a real driver) and no problems with networking.
All that it required was for me to disable ACPI in the BIOS. That’s honestly it. I don’t pass any options to the kernel, I don’t have any special tweaks anywhere.
I’ll reboot to check in my BIOS exactly what that option was again, and then post again on here, to let those interested know.
The option is “APIC Mode” under “Advanced BIOS options” in the Phoenix bios v3.2. Set that to disabled, and try that. It worked for me, I’ve not had any problems with network throttling down, or timer issues, or anything like that.
Hi guys
I’m interested in buying this MB in the hope that I would not need to buy a dedicated Graphics card. Did the ATI Direct Rendering work on this, and how good/bad is it for games?
Thanks
Wanted to check if the solution posted by Kiel solved the issues for other users?
Also which distro are you running Kiel?
Thanks in advance.
I have a different AMD motherboard (Chaintech MK8M800 with VIA chipset), but the same reboot problem.
Disabling the APIC from BIOS does not help. What works for me is either the i8042.reset boot parameter or a one line kernel change posted at http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0408.1/1505.html (almost a year ago…). Note that this is not an issue with 2.4 kernels.
I was a little hasty previously, to may chagrin now.
I was using Gentoo, and decided to put Windows on a partition for gaming, and due to a mistake proceeded to fsck up my Gentoo partitions. Thusly, I decided to go ahead and install Ubuntu, after Windows.
Windows will barely runs with that option disabled. If that option is enabled, Ubunutu (with boot parameters ‘noapic nolapic’) boots into a state I’d call ‘barely useable’ (64-bit version of Hoary Hedgehog), in that the slightest action causes 100% cpu useage, and sometimes opening firefox causes 15% load on the computer.
I wish that I could be of more help, but I’m still very unfamiliar with the workings of Linux in general.
Balaji, Kiel’s solution didn’t work for me either.
I’ve been struggling with this for a couple weeks, finally sat down and tried everything listed. I started with Mandriva LE2005, which installed fine on an SATA drive, but I still had the reboot/clock problems.
Advanced BIOS Features->APIC Mode = Disabled Power Management Setup->ACPI Function = Disabled
and use noapic as a boot option.
Doing any subset of those things prevented it from booting. Had to do all three, and it seems to be working fine.
I had no such problems that stopped boot process with kernel 2.6.11 (Debian packaged), but reboot halts sometimes before BIOS and clockskew was similar with others. Disabling ACPI also disables the automatic shutdown. :-(
It seems that MSI page has some BIOS updates, has anybody tried those? Maybe those are not very useful, at least according to the changelogs, changes look quite irrelevant for these problems.
With SATA hd, Debian wasn’t easy to install but I recompiled the installer with replace the kernel with 2.6.11 so I could install Debian testing (sarge) to my SATA hd… nice learning experience.
Rodney Moss wrote: “This is not a good board under any OS.”
But I have found it to work fine under Windows 2000. I am currently using it in a HTPC-PVR setup with a Silverstone LC-11M case and Hauppauge PVR-500 dual analog tuners. It works well under SageTV. However, it’s been my dream to eventually get to using Linux and MythTV. So while this board remains a rubbish option for Linux, I have to vigorously dispute that it is a bad board under Windows. The problem is that there are no other Socket 939 microATX solutions with integrated S-video and S/PDIF. Too bad, really, as these two features on a microATX board are very useful for HTPCs. Even though I feel like a tool for being restricted to running Windows, I have to admit that it does run pretty well, and for the price ($80) and features (no need for external audio or s-video) it’s a great choice. Besides, I can’t imagine anyone looking at this board who wasn’t specifically going to make a HTPC.
Rodney Moss wrote: “This is not a good board under any OS.”
But I have found it to work fine under Windows 2000. I am currently using it in a HTPC-PVR setup with a Silverstone LC-11M case and Hauppauge PVR-500 dual analog tuners. It works well under SageTV. However, it’s been my dream to eventually get to using Linux and MythTV. So while this board remains a rubbish option for Linux, I have to vigorously dispute that it is a bad board under Windows. The problem is that there are no other Socket 939 microATX solutions with integrated S-video and S/PDIF. Too bad, really, as these two features on a microATX board are very useful for HTPCs. Even though I feel like a tool for being restricted to running Windows, I have to admit that it does run pretty well, and for the price ($80) and features (no need for external audio or s-video) it’s a great choice. Besides, I can’t imagine anyone looking at this board who wasn’t specifically going to make a HTPC.
Rodney Moss wrote: “This is not a good board under any OS.”
But I have found it to work fine under Windows 2000. I am currently using it in a HTPC-PVR setup with a Silverstone LC-11M case and Hauppauge PVR-500 dual analog tuners. It works well under SageTV. However, it’s been my dream to eventually get to using Linux and MythTV. So while this board remains a rubbish option for Linux, I have to vigorously dispute that it is a bad board under Windows. The problem is that there are no other Socket 939 microATX solutions with integrated S-video and S/PDIF. Too bad, really, as these two features on a microATX board are very useful for HTPCs. Even though I feel like a tool for being restricted to running Windows, I have to admit that it does run pretty well, and for the price ($80) and features (no need for external audio or s-video) it’s a great choice. Besides, I can’t imagine anyone looking at this board who wasn’t specifically going to make a HTPC.
I apologize for the multiple (long) posts. Browser and connection problems.
Well, I bought an eMachines box with this mobo in it: Athlon64, 512MB, ATI Radeon 800 XPRESS.
I’ve tried a bunch of different distributions: SUSE 9{1,2} in 64bit, and RHEL4, Knoppix, aLinux, VectorLinux, and others in 32bit. Right now I’m running the just-released (a few hours ago!) FC4 and everything works except the built-in RTL8139C+ ethernet and the clock skew. I’m going to try rebooting with i8042.reset first, then try notimerhack (which already appears in the kernel source where the patch above would go).
I’ve downloaded the latest ATI drivers and will be installing them shortly. (I accidentally installed the 32bit drivers and guess what? They don’t work with a 64bit version of Xorg 6.8 – surprise, surprise! :) Anyway, so I’ll try the 64bit stuff next. And I’m bookmarking this page so that I can come back and report success/failure.
I’m getting the latest Debian 64bit via bittorrent right now; first DVD is done, the second has about 3 hours to go at 200KB/s. (Sigh. How did I ever survive with my old dial-up line?!?!)
With the noapic-option I have no problems exept the computer refuses to restart after a reboot. It runs http://www.elfpack.com/ http://www.cathug.com/ http://www.musmakers.com/ and a couple of other sites, so it’s a busy server on this dirtcheap motherboard. It runs Mandriva 2005 (preview), but I had to recomplie the kernel because the ATA (No problem with the SATA though) module wasn’t a part of the kernel (pretty strange!).
But now I’ve bought 2 GByte memory more that sums up to a total of 4 Gbyte. It’s 4 modules of “TwinMOS PC3200 DDR-DIMM 1024MB CL3 64M*8/16chip, 184-P (for DDR-PC400MHz)”. But the motherboard only finds 3.25 GByte memory! 3.25?!? Has anyone managed to get 4GByte on this card? I’ll do a test and see if there is something wrong with any of the (1GByte marked) modules later, but as the server is up and running, I don’t want to take it down right now just to see why I don’t get those 0.75GByte.
Henrik Wallin: I have the same 4 GIG issue where only 3.x of it appears in “top” command in shell. I have read that it is normal to only see 3.x of “real” memory out of 4 GIG of hardware. Please advise if you find out more. I am interested too. Also, I am having a problem getting X going on Gentoo on this board
For people with 4 GB probems–are you running a 32-bit Linux system or a 64-bit system? If it’s 32-bit, then make sure that the kernel is compiled with support for the highest amount of memory (I think it’s 64 GB, but I’m to lazy to check right now). The default is usually 4 GB these days, but that includes PCI I/O space and a bunch of other things, so you don’t actually get all 4 GB of RAM. Increasing the kernel’s limit to 64 GB will make it run a bit slower, but you’ll have access to all your RAM.
Advanced BIOS Features->APIC Mode = Disabled Power Management Setup->ACPI Function = Disabled and use noapic as a boot option.
This made me can’t halt my computer, what can i do?
Hi, I have a HP Pavilion a1070cl PC. This Pc uses this mainboard. I have two disks. One is SATA disk which installed Windows XP, the other one is IDE disk which installed FC4-64. The FC4-64 also have time problem. I set the noapic option when I boot the FC4-64, but the FC4-64 can’t boot. When I disable the SATA disk, the FC4-64 can boot up and the time problem has fixed. I don’t know why.
Thanks, Scott, for the reply. I am using Gentoo 64 bit O/S compiled from scratch. I have applied all of the stuff I have learned here and it has helped immensely. However, I have too issues, one not so big, the other very big. 1.) that 3.x of 4 gig RAM showing mentioned above. 2.) this is big because I cannot install a software package that requires X to be running and I do not have X running (never wanted to run X on this box but I have to because of some genius writing an X only version of installer with no way around it). So, bottom line is I dont know how to get X.org to work with on-board ATI Express 200. I get a black screen when I fire up X on that box. Any suggestions? Thank you. Regards, MyTzLpLk
One work-around for X-based installers: run X on another box and have the installer display things remotely. Just make sure that enough of X is installed to allow things like xterm to run, then (from a system with X working) ssh -X to the RS480 system. Then run the installer, and hopefully it’ll be happy.
To MyTzLpLk: You should use ati-drivers 8.13.3, which works well for me.
ppip, I’ve got Mandriva 2005 LE installed and working fine with ACPI enabled. I believe that ACPI is resoinsible for the rebooting functionality that you’re missing, so try enabling the ACPI again and see how things work for you.
Note that I do still have “noapic” specified.
On a separate tangent, the computer using this motherboard is now successfully changing its CPU speed based on the processing needs at the time, which is very nice for keeping my server running cool and quiet. All I had to do with my stock Mandriva 2005 LE was set /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor to “ondemand”. The functionality for this is now built into the kernel.. very cool!
ChrisChin wrote:
“So while this board remains a rubbish option for Linux, I have to vigorously dispute that it is a bad board under Windows.”
The rebooting issue seems very common with this board, in windows. That’s not a feature of a good board. The lack of voltage controls for ram is unpleasant. That’s not a feature of a good board. The low performance is not a good feature, either. All of these affect windows users. It may not be a particularly bad board for windows, but it is definately not good. At the time i wrote “this is not a good board under any circumstance”, ATI did not seem to acknowledge the chipset at all for any support questions, not just linux. That’s not a feature of a good board, either. How many BSOD’s are going to come from what turns up for linux users as the clock skew?
It does have a nice set of features. It would be a good board if it also worked well. Perhaps some people’s boards do work well.
I’m also not sure whether it’s still a rubbish option for linux. ATI might have submitted patches now in 2.6.12, the 3.4 bios might have fixed something, who knows? One day i’ll try them. But i’m in no hurry to test, i bought foxconn’s nforce4 microatx 939. Which works. Without having to edit kernel source if i want APIC. (needs a graphics card and fanless chipset heatsink, though)
Just to clearify:
Regarding the 4 GByte => 3.25GByte issue (Yes, it’s exactly 0.75GByte missing, down to the byte). It is what it shows in the BIOS at start-up, so this has nothing to do with the operating-system (which of course is a 64bit Mandriva 2005 LE).
Hopefully there will be a bios-update for this, but bios-updates are nothing I will try until I’m sure it works and I badly need that last 0.75 GByte.
And Chris Bennett: Thanks for those great tips! I really want my reboot to work, but I don’t pay for my power, so that is a non-issue ;-)
I’m really interested to have read the comments above from Chris Chin regarding the RS480. I have a very similar setup - RS 480, LC11M, PVR-500. However, it was very stable before adding the PVR-500, now is locks up - toally dead - when capturing video from the PVR-500. I put it down to the 500 and cant see much option apart from returning this and getting a more established card. I’d be most grateful if you could reply and let me know your settings etc if you have got the RS480 & PVR-500 combo to work. I think its a very good h/w choice for HTPC so far! cheers, Chris G
I have come to the conclusion that this board is just plain rubbish. With windows I found that apic, acpi, and AMD cool ‘n’ quiet off is the best setting. Windows 98 would not boot after install, even with different install CDS. Windows 2000: installed clock problems, slow, and blue screen of death. Windows XP 32bit sp1&2: New install disk took at least 10 attempts to install. Very slow boot time at least 4 min. even with assigned IP and or network disconnected. System clock still way too fast. All the programs hang or are very sluggish. With either a CRT or flat screen monitor picture quality was poor. However, the wintv card works okay. Sound, the tube transistor am radio in my 1950 Studebaker champion has better sound quality. None of the above was ironed out even with Norton 2005 system works. Now we come to Linux: Ubuntu 64 bit: installed no apic, acpi, and AMD cool ‘n’ quiet. No D.M.A.= no Ubuntu. Mandriva: would not go past install. Fedora Core (4) 64 bit: no apic, acpi, and AMD cool ‘n’ quiet. Fast works well, clock skew can be remedied by having the network correct the time at startup. Irritated by the fact of having to chase endless dependencies over multimedia copyright issues. Stuck with VESA. Sound is okay, better than windows XP. SUSE 9.3 64 bit: Fast works well. This one seems a bit odd, apic and acpi on, SuSe would not boot with either of those two off. Oh, and unless you like working with xdm don’t let xdm install for some reason SuSe likes to use that as default. Go to sysconf in Yast and disable acpi Cpu settings and the system will properly recognize your cpu speed. Sound is okay, better than windows XP. After dealing with the DVD copyright issue and getting the tv card to work, I thought I would stick with SuSe (more packages and less dependancies to chase). Still have not figured out the clock skew though. My final deal was the new ati flgrx driver. I thought if I followed the instructions verbatim I would not have any problems. Everything seemed to check out until reboot. The new driver messed up the X server. Now I can only boot into console. The fact that this board was not designed for Linux use I understand and accept. However, when this board which is designed for windows performs so poorly running windows (even with the new bios and driver updates) I think is reprehensible and down right fraudulent. After careful thought I have come up with the following solutions: Buy a plane ticket to Taiwan and choke the first MSI employee I see. Lobby congress against any arms shipments to Taiwan to counter the Chinese commies, Find an Ati employee and do the same, Choke out the jerk at computer renaissance who would not let me return the board because he did not install the board, wait till someone with more patience than I to figure it out, or do a little research before I make another impulse buy.
Anyone have SATA working on this board? If so, please post how you got it to work, as I’d be much grateful. I have a 250GB SATA HDD that I want to get up and installed, but I don’t know why it seems that everytime I modprobe the sata_sil module, while the HD is plugged in, it hangs. Also, even if the module isn’t probed, it hangs at boot with an IRQ #11 error message. TIA
Hi Kiel:
I have a 80G SATA HD on this board. I installed WinXP with SP2 on it. It works well.
Please check your bios setting: The SATA device shuld be set to “enable” and the apic shuld be set to “enable” too.
I’m also having a ?%$%?&&* of a time installing linux whit this motherboard. To same thing happen to me. After installing the motherboard, it booted ma Windows Xp partition fine execpt of having to use the install CD to repair. But, the computer give me all kind a error messages when I tried to boot me Mandrake 10.2 partition. I’ve tried re-installing several time, but the systeme always freeze. I’ve tried Suse 9.3, FC4, Mandrake 10, all without any succes. The only Linux version that installed correctly is Xandros 3.0 but it’s doesn’t sut me because there is no french version yet. I was almost able to install Mandriva LE 2005 x86_64 last night by unpluging all my USB device and using a PS/2 mouse an disabling autodetec devices, but I’ve forgot that I also needed a PS/2 keyboard ! So I had to shutdown my computer when I was ask to input a pasword ! I guest I going to try again as soon I get my hand on a PS/2 keyboard.
Yeah, it was being recognized by Win for me as well, but I wanted to use it in Linux.
As for that, I got it working. I had to enable APIC (as in remove the “noapic” boot parameter), but now I don’t get any response from the USB on the MB; I couldn’t use my USB keyboard or mouse, which was a pain. However, the SATA drive works fine now&#