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

[Don Freeman]

Have you thought about sending the MB in for a free replacement? It may
still be under warranty. 

-----Original Message-----
From: tfug-bounces at tfug.org [mailto:tfug-bounces at tfug.org] On Behalf Of Mike
Martinet
Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2006 1:19 PM
To: tfug at tfug.org
Subject: [Tfug] Linux, 939, AGP, k8t890 and nforce

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

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