* ahv [ at ] avantel [ dot ] ca <ahv [ at ] avantel [ dot ] ca> [070424 11:24]: > It may have been a fluke but my purchase of an Asus A8N-VM MB has > not worked our for using software raid with sata drives. The > on-board raid has been disabled and the sata_nv driver detects the > drives OK but writing fails during install. Google tells me it's a > "known problem". > > Does anyone have an example of a locally (ottawa) purchased MB > (almost everyone sells Asus)that worked OK for sata drives and > software raid (I'm using Centos 4.4) It's needed for a light duty > web/mail/SQL server. Strangely enough I have this same motherboard (at least the A8N part) and have 8 SATA drives connected to it (4 on board and 4 on 2 additional PCI controllers) all in software raid (2 sets of RAID0 over RAID1). So what specifically is the problem here? Is this a Centos problem? Now, I've had issues on some historical kernels with SMP (dual core) and nv drivers. However, with UP kernels it's been rock solid, on this and other motherboards. For me it wasn't even software raid related, just any high traffic going through the southbridge (like gigabit networking, or DRM enabled in X). Everything is working in 2.6.20.7. Can you try running with noapic noacpi -- they are both kernel options, you pass them through grub or lilo. I don't remember which actually helps in this situation, but one of them does and the other is not harmful. I don't know what Centos 4.4 is, but it sounds like a RHEL4 clone. That's running 2.6.9 if my memory serves me right. That's a really old kernel. -Bart -- WebSig: http://www.jukie.net/~bart/sig/