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Simon Avery wrote: > 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. > > Thats interesting. Didn't it give you a warning message on the BIOS saying that it was using a 40 conductor IDE cable rather than an 80 conductor cable? > 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. > > Will keep that in mind for future reference. > 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 : Oooh sounds nice. I use a dual core Pentium D 820 at work (2 x 2.8GHz with 1MB cache on each core) but I would love an Athlon 64 X2. I checked the prices of the entry level X2's the other day and it seems they're now getting within reach of the masses. I think my next upgrade will be an X2 although I doubt it'll be a 4800+ (unless that is I win the lottery or get a pay rise ;-) Rob -- 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