There you go again, Patrick, with your phrases of obscure meaning. Oh, well, at least they're not obscene this time. Thanks for the advice.

I have used Asus and Asrock. Had problems a couple years ago with Asus boards being to flimsy and almost breaking. Have 7 Asrock machines running at a school, workhorse board. Use Asus for everthing else, just research the board good online and there's no reason why you shouldn't get an Asus.

Ain't nothing wrong with ASUS. You get what you pay for, high price = high quality. It's like with whatever you buy in this world, including mobos.

Asrock and Foxconn, although cheap are of poor quality. And if you want to use Linux on that computer do NOT get an ASUS board unless you know that it works, because chances are it won't work. You'll have better luck with Gigabyte or Abit. Mostly I would say to also stay away from anything JMicron.

Well, disregarding Asus and the mother brands I've avoided, the brand whose boards are most numerous on the sites I look at is Biostar. I haven't seen a JMicron.

The only board I've found that has both 2 PATA headers and at least 3 PCI ports, which I'd prefer, is an MSI, and I am hearing mixed reviews of MSI in these threads. Worse, that board is an open box, and I'm reluctant to risk it.

Nah, JMicron doesn't make boards, but they do make buggy AHCI/SATA controllers that come with many boards, especially Gigabyte ones.

I don't think this thread is fully about boards because Foxconn makes cases and PSUs.

You can also check the HCL:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/index.php/cat/8

Well, just bought myself the ASUS Striker Extreme II Ultra edition for my new system!! You can all say what you want, I'm very chuffed!

Ah! Oh, man! DENNIS. DENIS.

Yeah, I'd second H_TeXMex_H on this; I've had good luck with Abit boards. Though it took some work to get linux working well with the Abit IP35 board. It would not boot properly with Ubuntu unless I set the SATA mode to AHCI, and it would not work with Debian unless I set the SATA mode to IDE and used the irqpoll boot option. Hopefully this will go away some day with a new kernel version.

Which means that it is not in SATA mode at all - IDE is PATA emulation. I guess you need to upgrade to Lenny to get this working properly, if that doesn't work then I would think that ABIT is not that great at all.

But I wonder why Foxconn and Asrock have been called poor quality. Various review sites have called Foxconn the best board in terms of price/performance and the only reason that Asrock is cheaper is that they tend to avoid the newer sort of components.
As for the JMicron myth, that is now long outdated. It has worked fine with mainstream Linux for at least a year now.

Hopefully your BIOS settings and your kernel options are compatible ... i.e. you set SATA to AHCI in the BIOS and you enabled ahci in the kernel.

Well, if only that were true, I bought a Gigabyte board with a JMicron controller and the only way to keep the system stable and usable is to completely disable IDE and PATA support in the kernel. There are 2 SATA controllers on this board one Intel with doesn't support IDE, and a JMicron which supports IDE. I guess this is what many board manufacturers now do to keep support for IDE.

I bought an IDE-SATA adapter, a little circuit board that plugs into a drive's port and connecting to a SATA port with a normal SATA cable, for one of my hard drives, but it doesn't work. The computer doesn't detect the drive. I'm sure the the adapter is receiving power along with the drive, because its LED is lighting up. I think I have it connected the right way, if connecting it upside-down is even possible. I even tried connecting it to different SATA ports, although I knew that should be as pointless as it would be with a USB device. Any suggestions?

Do you mean a SATA controller card? From your description, it doesn't sound like an IDE-to-SATA adapter. Type? Model?

Oops! This was supposed to be a new thread. It's attached to this one because I clicked the wrong button. Wel, this adapter doesn't say what model or type it is. But I bought it from this eBay auction: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...MEWN:IT&ih=012 . Maybe that would be helpful.