On the other hand, I have had no trouble with it whatsoever. SuSe detected and set up everything first time, and so far not so much as a hiccup. Good VFM, highly recommended.

I have the same problems. Every installation results in different errors. It's related to the IDE. I use an old 20Gb Maxtor HD.

Hi I could not get this Mobo to accept an install from any of the above, until I was told on this forum to go to options on the Mandrake install and enter 'linux noapic noloapic and my memory size.
Then I could get past the errors which were to do with the IDE controller Chip SIS5500 I think?
So then I have a nice dual boot Win ME and Mandrake system, and wishing to make some room for another OS I load Partition Magic8 and the drive letters are not recognised plus there were several faults partition magic had to correct before bombing at this stage.
I did not get to change any partitions, It's not the Hard Drive I had it multi-booting fine on a Gigabyte Ga7-DXE Mobo less than a week ago.
Guess there are problems with this Mobo in windows but until you do some admin type maintenance like using a partition tool you will not find out.

Guess with all the onboard LAN,5.1 sound etc at $35 dollars it was asking too much.

The Mobo works fine for the most part but it looks like the IDE controller screws up the File allocation tables a bit.

This mainboard has a general problem when you run it with 2 drives on ide2.
I could not install Slackware,Debian,Suse on the second HD ( hdc, 160 GB as master on second IDE )
Also Knoppix refuses to boot ( any version ) unless you apply the 'noapic' command at bootprompt ( #: Linux24 noapic )
After this, all hardware is recognized well and works without any problems.

I also installed Slackware 9.1 and Slackware 10 successfully on hda ( 160 GB Master on first IDE )

A BIOS- Update should solve the problem, as I read in some posts, but I did not try it so far.

Also I had several problems partitioning the second HD with windows.
A poor board :(
It works fine as long you just use one HD....

Have had only one problem with this mobo. The NIC fell over when used in conjunction with another one. Other than that, no issues. Runs fast and stable, overclocking is a breeze and so far has not created any problems with stability. Running now for about 3 months non stop.
Using 2 40Gb hard drives on ide1, and 2 cdroms (1 a writer) on ide2.
984Mb ram across the 3 slots and an AMD Athlon XP 2400 clocked to 2700. Soundblaster 5.1 LIve, conexant modem, Nvidia Geforce FX5200 128Mb and sis900 ethernet. All hardware worked first time in both Slack and MDK, and from Knoppix live CD. It even survived my processor fan failing and the processor running into the thermal shutdown zone. All in all, a very satisfactory Mobo.

I have now ripped this Mobo out and replaced it.
Why....
The IDE controller is naff.
It can't control Hard Disks or DVD writers without creating corrupt files.
It works well with one partition but put another hard drive partition in and it screws up.
It is Mobo specific as a problem, not operating system, it ain't worth the money.
Systems tried unsuccesfully, Win98,ME,2K,XP
Linux Mandrake 9.0,9.1,9.2,10, SUSE 9.1,Redhat 9, Fedora Core 1&2,Debian 'Sarge & Woody'
In short I tried but although it installs using the fix above if necessary it can't transfer files without corrupting them.
The replacement MSI Mobo, has no problems, using the rest of the hardware the Asrock couldn't control.

Mad Malc

AVOID THIS MOBO

Even if I already wrote something about this board, I have to add some more comments, after a long time of trouble and a lot of dirty fights with this MoBo:

I totaly agree with Mad Malc
I will rip off this Board after a long period of trouble.
As I said in my previous post, the board is fine as long as you run only one HD on IDE1, with a maximum of 3 primary partitions and no logical partitions at all. WindowsXP is fine with this ( but has problems with getting the right harddisk parameters ! ).
A very poor Linux MoBo :-(

Debian ( Sarge ):
still refuses to install on this board
( weird problem: the installation is running fine but when you try to boot, there is NOTHING installed on the partitions ! Just like nothing has been written or installed.... this is really strange.... )

Slackware 10:
Install went fine and everything was running like a breeze.....
...... for one day. :-(
The next day, LILO gives me a missing vga setting ( but it is there in the lilo.conf ), and sometimes it just refuses to boot because it can´t see any partitions ( there are hda1, hda2, hda3, hda5, hda6, hda7 on my 160 GB HD )

Suse 9.1 Pro:
see Debian. Exactly the same problem, plus GRUB refuses to install :-(

Ubuntu 4.10 ( Warthy Warthog ):
Installed very fine and kept running very fine with no problems at all ! ( I don´t understand this because it is nothing but a well patched Debian, I guess... )


A very very poor motherboard for Linux !!

Initial problems due to out of date BIOS (2.20) which has since been corrected, HDD access has been rectified if you update the BIOS all should be fine. Never got the 5.1 sound to work though, gave up and bought a cheap sound card!

I use this motherboard since I rebuild my computer 2 years ago.

Initially under Suse 8.2 I had enormous amounts of trouble relating mostly to APIC etc.

Now - for the last year or so things are running stable and without any major problems. I di dmess around with FC2, Suse 9.0 and latterly with ubuntu for teh last year or so.

The integrated sound does not work - or at least I have not got it to work ever.

Network, USB, IDE ports all fine, no issue.