I have this motherboard with two Opteron 244s and have it working fine with SUSE 9.1 and Gentoo. However, I am not using SATA. I am using a PATA WD1200JB-75CRA0. Your problem is definitely due to SATA; so concentrate your efforts there. Oh, my memory is 2x512MB Corsair 3200LL running at DDR400. On Wed, Jun 16, 2004 at 11:57:09AM -0500, Brock Witherspoon wrote:
Gr?ss,
I have 4 of these systems that will go into production soon. 3 of them are exactly the same, while the 4th has different hard drives. All of them are experiencing the same problem. I have gone from FreeBSD 5.2.1 to Mandrake 10 (amd64 RC1) to SuSE 9.1 Professional (DVD box set) in search of something that will actually work and perform well. I just used YaST to download the most recent kernel patches, so I'm now at 2.6.4-54-5-smp.
Here is my configuration:
MSI K8T Master2-FAR 2x Opteron 242 2x 512MB OCZ DDR400 RAM ("Specially Engineered and Optimized for the AMD Athlon64 FX platform") 2x WD Raptor 36GB (also WD 160GB SATA drives) 52x IDE CD-ROM 360 Watt Thermaltake PS
These will be servers, so they have no video cards in them (therefore no X etc.). I used an old ViRGE PCI card to do the install. (ncurses based YaST could use some work BTW, particularly in setting up the partitions)
I have a fresh install of SuSE 9.1 Professional, installed off of the DVD in the box set. I had to disable acpi in order to install, and naturally I went with the Linux software RAID to raid the disks.
Watching top is very interesting. Right before a crash, the wa (I/O wait) CPU % goes way up, 50% or more. Then the system becomes unresponsive.
I've searched the 'net and this list and still haven't come up with a thorough prescription for how to fix my problem. I seemed to have made some progress after enabling the libata driver, as the test machine lasted a lot longer this time before failing.
I've got INITRD_MODULES="via_sata libata reiserfs raid1" in /etc/sysconfig/kernel and append = "resume=/dev/hda11 splash=silent acpi=off apm=off console=tty0" in /etc/lilo.conf.
I'm not sure if the libata module "took"; someone else said that I needed to see my SATA drives as sd# rather than hd#. Well, in the boot messages the drives were still called hda and hdc. I am unfamiliar with the entire kernel rebuilding process in Linux, and with how the modules work.
Mostly I just want to hear from somebody else who has this motherboard, exactly what they did to get everything working, because I've tried everything I'm capable of doing. I've found some helpful things so far, but I haven't yet hit the magic bullet.
Of course I can put up any further needed information. I've just got to get these machines working!
Thank you,
Brock Witherspoon
-- Brian Hall Linux Consultant http://pcisys.net/~brihall