Hi Mark, To be more of a field finder than zeroing in on what exactly was wrong without a doubt I tried multiple things. To start after the second most recent re-install the system was running well enough to check the logs and I saw an error allocating IRQ 7 to the TV tuner. Pulling out the SB 128 card cleared things up enough for the IRQ conflict on the tuner to go away and the TV card started working again. The system was still all messed up and I thought it might be wise to start with a clean slate and with ACPI disabled from the get go. I re-installed the system with ACPI disabled from the get go. With this setting and with the SB 128 card removed the system installed fine and all known working hardware came up and functioned fine before patches. So at this point I knew having less hardware definitely had an effect 9.3's ability to configure it properly, but I couldn't really gauge the affect disabling ACPI had. After this I installed all of the latest patches to see if there was something inherent to them that caused further problems. After installing patches, system was still fine, even after a reboot. The most recent thing I did was to put the SB 128 card back into the system. Everything came up and all seems to be well at least. So though not the most scientific way of going about things it looks to me like the suggestion of ACPI being at the heart of the matter causing resource allocation problems was the problem and the solution of disabling ACPI on boot was the solution. Thanks for your help.
Try the following (we've seen this before with some Asus boards):
1. Make sure you have the latest BIOS, and follow the Asus procedure for loading the Default BIOS settings after the first reboot, and then go back in to configure the BIOS to your specs. Make sure you turn off in the BIOS any of the hardware that you are not using.
2. In the BIOS, there is a global memory timing setting that Asus likes to set at "Optimal" but which we have found should be set to "Normal" unless you are running, say, CL2 memory sticks when the board specs call for CL3. The loss to performance is minimal.
3. When installing SuSE (or when booting now), add the following to the kernel parm line: noapic apm=off acpi=off
Let us know how it goes...
Mark
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Reliable Networks of Maine, LLC
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