Hi,
I am having a problem with my newly purchased system. I have a amd64 on a asus a8n-vm csm and i want to run either Fedora Core on it. This pc is meant to allow us to share a hard drive over the network, dvd burner and run video editing too.

I downloaded the latest Fedora Core 4 x86_64 I could find (w/ kernel 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4) and installed it on my system. During the install i had to select the proper driver dor the sata drive (only one i have there) which worked fine. So i proceeded normally and completed the install last night.

This morning i tried to boot it to start the server for the first time and configure the shares and it just didnt boot. It detects all hardware in the initial screen and goes to the graphical setup screen. Once there it goes well until it reaches the network configuration ("Bringing up loopback interface").

At this point it either:
1 - hangs, if i use "noapic" at the boot prompt
2 - reboots if i dont use any parameters at boot time.

Does anyone have any idea why this happens? I read that there are several issues w/ this nvidia based mobo. I must say i am starting to hate their products because each time i get a new system i have the very same kind of problems. Thanks for any help provided,

I've got the same board, but running 32 bit. Some common themes that kept cropping up:

- make sure you're running the latest bios. Specifically, it seems to have resolved _most_ of the USB problems I was having. ie. System didn't like anything USB2 (devices or the port itself) during install, and then intermittently once it was installed. You could also set USB to FullSpeed in the BIOS, see if it helps you.

- unplug USB stuff during boot, see if you get any further. (I had a USB keyboard, and when USB freaked out, I thought that it froze, too)

- sometimes if you don't have the network driver setup right, it'll pause for a while (3-4 mins?). I don't know if this is 100% true, because I went from a VM to VM CSM board before re-installing to try fixing some other stuff.

- I always used the nvnet driver from NVidia, forcedeth worked ok, but just had less problems with the NVidia one. Is it the cause? Don't know, too many other issues were cropping up.

- I like disabling ports (serial, parallel) that I'm not using. I usually do this with other (benign) things in the BIOS. Whatever I was doing was consistently preventing me from booting linux. (so I just stopped everything, reset everything, and refrained from doing THAT again - just don't have the patience right now) Sometimes the system wouldn't come up after, which is pretty weird, because I wasn't doing anything "too cool" in there.. (reset BIOS via jumper)

good luck.

Hank

I have no external device connected to my desktop hence no usb device. I just tried to boot it again. This time i used the "nodetect" option. It still hangs. I tried the interactive load and it hangs also. At first i thought it could be some issue w/ the system itself but it took me over 4 hours to complete the installation last night since i was downloading the iso and burning them on demand. When i boot w/ no options i get a message from ACPI/APIC complaining about something i cant recall right now(this is why i started the whole thing w/ the noapic thing). I wonder if i have to update my BIOS. I read somewhere that someone got it to work with SUSE.

FYI: I still get that message, too. I've read up that it's a malformed string, but it hasn't affected me so far (that I can tell, anyways). Also, while researching my other problem, I installed FC4, FC4.2 (unofficial respin), kanotix (live), suse 10.0, and fc5 test 2 - all 32-bit. They all worked ok.