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I built a new server for work this weekend. Nice athlon64-x2 4800. 80GB IDE, root, usr, var and home drive, 400gb sata for specific data. All fine. POSTs. Boot to CD of latest Debian testing netinst. Follow through the install, grab several main packages - leave it alone to download and install for several hours. Come back - it's finished, giving me the final "remove cd and reboot" prompt. Do so. Boot failure. Not even a grub prompt. So I figure the grub install has failed, or the partition isn't set active. I reboot to cd, fix that, verify boot flag with cfdisk - try again, same. Reinstall grub a few times - nothing. I try some old IDE drives to see if the mobo/controller is narfed. They work fine. Prize to anyone who knows what the problem was... On one of the boots, I noticed some error messages flash past before being hidden by the curses install screens. I flipped across the alt+f2 and dmesg|more to see what they were. They were complaining of DMA failure on that device. Turns out, when building the machine, I'd re-used the ide cable that was in the case. It wasn't ATA/100 and the data was being corrupted as it was written. The install software was hiding, or not reporting, the errors so all appeared well. No write error occured during the install that was shown to me. I replaced the cable with the new one that came with the mobo and the grub menu appeared - but then failed a boot due to the corruption. However, a second full reinstall worked fine. The other IDE drives worked since they were older. Something new to me, worth bearing in mind if building a new box. By the way - for the curious, the X2 Athlons are great. These are AMD's dual-core beasts and yes, they work as spec. They do need a SMP kernel to make full use, debian at least doesn't assign one by default but there is a recent Athlon SMP kernel in the main package lists - just pick it with dselect and it will install automatically. Reboot and you have two processors. htop gives accurate usage per cpu. It just works! (This is using a 32-bit kernel mind, some software I run doesn't work too great in 64-bit mode) It runs cool (32-40c with the retail hs/fan) and if like the other athlons I use, will be rock solid. "Total of 2 processors activated (8853.98 BogoMIPS)." Nice :) -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html