Re: OT about Asus, was Re: What is the point of RAID?
lee wrote:
On Fri, 07 Nov 2008 21:21:23 -0600
Mark Allums <mark@allums.com> wrote:
Did you read the whole post?
Yes, I did; why do you ask?
I do not wish to appear as if I "worship" them. They are so huge, they
are bound to have a few duds. (They make a lot of boards for OEMs, like
HP and Dell and many others. As does Intel.) Asus is like Any other
large company. They have so many irons in the fire, they can't please
everyone, though they try. Sometimes, even Mercedes makes a lemon.
What do you mean, when you say "lose/lost connection to the disk"? I
don't recall having anything like that ever happen. Sounds a bit
like a cabling problem.
The disk became "unreachable", the error message was something like
that the "device or ressource is busy". Rebooting didn't help, I had to
turn the computer fully off before the disk became "reachable" again.
It worked for a while then --- could be a few days or two or three
months --- and for no apparent reason, it would lose connection again.
It wasn't a cabling problem either, I tried another cable and swapped
the disks, to no avail.
I have had similar problems after a serious crash/lockup. Even a hard
reset wasn't enough; the machine had to be powered down. But this only
occurred when the machine was truly borked. It didn't seem to be a
fault of the manufacturer of the motherboard, it seemed to be a fault of
the chipset or possibly the BIOS settings. If the CMOS is corrupted, it
can really ruin your day.
I had a deal with Asus boards where, if you made a change to the disk
setup, like adding or removing a drive, the BIOS would change the
default boot disk without asking. That was pretty obnoxious. But is
was not a hardware problem.
How would you update the BIOS? I quit using floppy disks many years
ago, and they didn't have something to download and burn a bootable CD
from to update the BIOS of that board. Even if a BIOS update would have
fixed the problem, it wasn't possible to update it --- and it didn't
fix it for the boards we had at work.
I still put a floppy drive in my personal machines. It's getting hard
to find good floppies. The newer machines can boot from USB flash, and
if you are using Windows, they have the ability to update from within
Windows while Windows is running. I never fixed the bootable disk bug,
I just lived with it, it didn't affect me that often, and just required
a reboot to restore the proper setting.
I hear you can create a bootable CD to do a BIOS update, but I never
tried it. At work, I think we would have to go to the trouble of adding
a floppy long enough to to the update. The drives are less expensive
than the floppies are, now. Correctly wired ribbon cables are getting
hard to find, too.
Before that, I've had a couple MSI boards, at home and at work, and
I've never had any trouble with them. I would have bought MSI again,
but the Asus board seemed to have some advantages, and Asus had a good
reputation. After that experience, I'm not buying Asus anymore and can
only recommend to stay away from them.
MSI is a good manufacturer. They are well-made. I may get an MSI next
time, if they offer a board with the features I am looking for.
Good luck!
Mark Allums
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