[Tfug] Linux, 939, AGP, k8t890 and nforce

[Mike Martinet]

Serious frustration.

Last year, I bought (what I thought) was a cutting-edge combo for $200.  Athlon 64 dual-core, ECS KV2 K8T800 MoBo and a gig of RAM.

I had absolutely no problem installing, configuring and using FC4_x64.  The MoBo died a week ago last Thursday, and since then, I've tried SIX motherboards, none of which would boot.

The CPU forces me to use a 939 socket, which I just found out is going away.  None of the five locally available MBs offered AGP slots.  All five MBs had nVidia chipsets of some sort on them.  ALL of these chipsets appear to be incompatible with Knoppix 4&5, FC4,5&6 and Ubuntu.  Linux, with each and every one of these MBs, would halt during the boot process with "Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS unable to mount root fs".  All of the above distributions exhibited the same error.  Enormous amounts of searching led to a workaround that never worked for me.  The workaround consisted of various combinations of kernel parameters - linux noapic, apci=off, pci=bios, nofb, blah, blah, blah.

One kernel parm did get me a step further - that was "linux root=/dev/hdc".  Then the next error was "Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel".  I could never find a suitable argument for this parameter.

The sixth motherboard (ECS K8T890-A) came mail-order from NewEgg with a VIA K8T890 chipset.  After decompressing the kernel, I get a CRC error and the system stops.  This might be due to the AGP card, because I found out, after I opened the box, that the MB doesn't really support AGP - it's offering some bastardized PCI/AGP hybrid, which, even if I could get the MB to work, would mean my AGP performance would be degraded.  On top of that, the IDE connectors are too far away from the topmost drive in my full-size ATX case and there's no audio header on the board.  The audio header wouldn't be that much of a problem, but with the AGP card installed, there's only room in one of the two PCI slots, which means I get to pick whether I want an audio card or my PVR board.

I'm mostly ranting, and offering a warning, I guess.  If anyone has any real, solid solutions, I might consider going back and getting the KN1 SLI Extreme Lite, but right now, I guess I'm going to send in the KV2 for replace/repair and use my old Tyan dual 266PII with FC5.

Oh.  nVidia does offer linux drivers for PATA (which I'm guessing is IDE) but they require either recompiling the kernel or installing on a running system with RPM.  Obviously, the latter won't work if I can't get the darn thing to boot in the first place.

Cheers!

MjM