Re: Mobo Intel DG965WH with Lenny or etch?
On Sun, Oct 07, 2007 at 10:07:20AM -0500, Igor TAmara wrote:
> Hi, I have an Intel DG965WH, I tried to use etch netinst and lenny
> businesscard october 6 /2007, but both of them failed on the step of
> CD recognition, it has two SATA HD drives, the DVD is connected
> through IDE, the processor is an Intel core 2 Duo. It has 4 gigs of
> RAM
>
> The most annoying thing is that it boots really slow, it looks like
> slow motion, the menus of the installation shows line per line
> refreshing, like a 133mhz or worst.
>
> Have anyone succesfully used this hardware? Any hints on booting the
> installation or maybe testing the hardware to see if something is
> broken? Maybe software to test if everything is right?
How much ram do you have installed?
A number of BIOSes have very very serious bugs in their MTRR setup on
intel chipsets lately, and if you have more than 3GB of ram, some memory
may not be configured as cacheable, and since linux likes to use ram
from the top down you end up with the kernel in uncacheable ram and
hence very slow booting. For many boards there are updated bioses to
fix this mistake, but if there isn't yet you can tell the kernel at the
boot command line that you have less ram than you actually have which
will make it go much faster (since the small bit of uncached ram will
not be used). Since you have 4GB of ram this is quite likely your
problem. So check that you have the very latest BIOS version. You can
test for the problem by adding 'mem=3072M' or 2048M or whatever, and see
if it boots faster. If it does you can then grab the /proc/mtrr output
as well as the dmesg output and post that to have someone check if the
bios is making a mistake.
A search on some forums seems to indicate that intel's 1705 bios does
not fix it, and that people are going back to version 1669 to get a bios
that does the right thing (who knows what it may break though). There
is a 1707 that I haven't found any info on yet, so maybe there is a
small chance it fixes the problem. Most other board makers have fixed
this error by now (Asus and Gigabyte certainly have), while the kernel
developers have had no luck what so ever convincing intel that they
screwed up big time.
There are attemps being made to make future kernels automatically
disable any uncached ram if such a case occours again.
AS for the DVD others seem to have pointed out that it uses an
unsupported controller that needs the newer kernel so you can't help
that with etch at all.
--
Len Sorensen
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