On Tuesday 24 April 2007 21:56, you wrote: > * 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. To all who discussed HW vs SW raid - my choice is SW raid to keep cost down. IF someone has a *working* HW raid configuration I would be interested in which RAID board you used and if you needed any special drivers. . . > > 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). Apparently there are different flavours of the A8N boards and the original VM board (that I have) had problems with the chipset not working with the sata_nv drivers. Since it was an nvidea/nforce problem, nobody was interested in "fixing" the drivers to accommodate the problem - understandable! At least that's my understanding based on a endless googling > > So what specifically is the problem here? Is this a Centos problem? Not AFAIK. What I don't know is when this problem got fixed so if you have an A8N board that works - let me know which one, please! > > 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. Tried that - no joy. > > I don't know what Centos 4.4 is, but it sounds like a RHEL4 clone. Right - but without the support price thrown in. Other than that it's RHEL from people making a point about OSS > That's running 2.6.9 if my memory serves me right. That's a really old > kernel. Yeah, I'm not looking for (b)leading edge - I have other boxes for that :). I'll go with Centos 5 at some point but it needs time to settle down. What would you use for a "production" server? Cheers; > Alex ==== > -Bart > > -- > WebSig: http://www.jukie.net/~bart/sig/ -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by Avantel Systems, and is believed to be clean.