I just put together computer with an AMD Phenom II X6 1090T processor, Asus M4A89GTD PRO motherboard, Wind Storm case with only 2Gigs of ram. I'm installing the newest stable version of Debian, AMD64.

Prior to building this computer I built another with the AMD Phenom II x4 955 processor, Asus M4A785T-M/CSM motherboard 8Gigs ram.

It appeared that I didn't have to use the Asus driver disk, because when I inserted disk to load the drivers it went to a prompt as if it was just a support disk instead of giving me other options. When I loaded the operating system it worked fine though.

1. Are the new motherboards bios already flashed or did the disk actually load the drivers and I was just unaware that it loaded them and went immediately to a prompt awaiting a command?
2. While waiting for my additional memory to arrive having a 6 core processor do you have to have all of the memory slots filled to utilize the 64bit capabilities of the processor or do you still get 64 bits with 1 or 2 sticks of ram?
3. I have 2 sata hard drives both are 1Tb, When dual booting am I better off having os on separate drives?
4. Is there anyway to findout if I need to do anything to the bios of the 1st computer that I built with quad core processor?

All newbie questions. Thank you for your responses in advance.

Hello there!

Driver disks that come with hardware such as motherboards, usually contain a lot of MS Windows stuff, but rarely anything you want or need for Linux.

1) Motherboard BIOSes are already flashed from the factory. When booting Linux, most or all hardware drivers come from within the Linux kernel.

2) With a 64bit machine, you still get 64bits regardless how much RAM you have installed.

3) You can dual boot from one or both drives. My opinion is that using one drive is simpler, but the differences in most cases should be trivial.

4) If the other machine is working fine, then there's nothing that needs to be changed in the BIOS. You might want to get a little bit familiar with your machine's BIOS in case you ever do need to adjust something, but by default, if everything works, you don't need to change anything.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you GrapefruiTGirl.
I've found your answers very helpful and comforting.
I am going to dual boot the system but contemplating which method. I'm leaning more towards separate drives, being that I'm a newbie. Another question.

With this system being sata, having an os on each hard drive, contains it's own mbr?

Hi,
Look at Master boot record, which defines the first sector of a partitioned data storage device, used for booting. Then look at Linux File System section of 'Slackware-Links' to understand filesystems.

Just a few links to aid you to gaining some understanding;
Linux Documentation Project
Rute Tutorial & Exposition
Linux Command Guide
Utimate Linux Newbie Guide
LinuxSelfHelp
Getting Started with Linux
Bash Reference Manual
Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide
Linux Home Networking

The above links and others can be found at 'Slackware-Links'. More than just Slackware® links!

The links provided by onebuck give a pretty good explanation of how it works from the technical angle of it. As I understand it in plain(er) English:

-- Each HDD in a machine, has or *can* have an MBR. Each HDD *does* have a partition table.
-- Only one MBR is needed to boot one or more OS's
-- machine at power-on looks for a bootable floppy or CD/DVD, and failing those, an MBR on a hard disk (HDD).
-- a modern and/or clever machine will check the 2nd and subsequent HDD for an MBR if none is found on HDD1

Don't quote me just yet on these points; I'm certainly open for correction or more input on these points, either by other members or if one of those onebuck links says something different.

While I have some SATA devices in my own machine, I do not currently boot from a SATA HDD or from my second HDD, so if there's anything quirky about doing this, I cannot say as I haven't done it. But lots of members likely have done that very thing, so more information should be forthcoming.

There are a few LQ members whose names come to mind as being particularly knowledgeable when I think about multi-booting, chain-loading multiple OS's and doing more advanced boot-loader configurations, and I'm sure that some of these members will be around sooner or later to help you if you come to a stumbling block when setting up your dual/multi-boot system.

Best regards!

Hi,

GrapefruiTgirl is correct. I think one of the members is saikee who does muti-MAX© dual boots.

Look at his sig for links;
saikee' Signature Linux user started Jun 2004 - No. 361921
Using a Linux live CD to clone XP
To install Linux and keep Windows MBR untouched
A Grub menu booting 100+ systems & A "Howto" to install and boot 145 systems
Just cloning tips for cloning XP/Vista/Linux/BSD/Solaris or migration to a bigger hard disk
Just booting tips A collection of booting tips

Actually, I would argue that you should look through all the options in the BIOS and change them if you know what you are doing, check the manual. Some things may need to be changed.

As for a BIOS update, it should only be necessary if there is a problem / bug or if some support was added between the time the board was made and the time you bought it, like new CPUs and RAM, etc.

@ TexMex,

I agree with you:

Personally, on my own machine, I would go through all the BIOS options and see what was what, maybe fiddle around with some things. Probably many folks who are inquisitive, experienced with BIOS a little bit, and understand what's in there and what it does, will look for things to tweak.

However:

But for a person who isn't comfortable doing that, AND/OR if absolutely no reason has presented itself to do so (like system instability, non-functioning hardware, device won't boot, etc..) then I stand by what I wrote: if nothing's wrong, there's no reason to go fiddling about.

An example of fiddling that would perhaps be a good idea, would be to set RAM memory timings and settings to the specs indicated by the RAM manufacturer. But usually the default "AUTO" setting will work fine. System instability would be an indicator that something wants to be adjusted.

Moral: If it isn't broke, don't fix it, and don't break it.

If OP finds that something in particular isn't working right, or seems not to be, I suggest making a new thread about that issue, where the issue can be explained and someone(s) can make a suggestion that a BIOS setting adjustment might help the issue.

Cheers all!

It is true that if you don't know what you are doing, then you should either read the manual, or not mess with the options.

I was thinking of options like the processor number limit (pre-Window$ XP needs this, but it may be on for no reason), boot order (not always correct, by default mine was wrong), SATA controller (if Linux refuses to see the drive, may want to change this one), etc.

I insatalled the first os, it went well, but when I boot up I get 1 message that states no drive found and then it loads the os. On this machine everything is sata, on the other machine it has an ide dvd player I don't get this message at boot. I'm going to add an ide drive to see if this may be the reason.

As for the machine with the 955 processor, I built that 1 last month. I am going to go back thru the bios and double-check the settings, I did set the boot order and unlock the cpu cores I just didn't go into that 1 after getting it running because I put that 1 together for the wife. I don't really even use it. If you look at my original threads you'll see why.

I'm getting ready to download and boot live cd to see how it does then dual-boot.

Sata or no sata the way the bios "sees" a hard drive is one item. Second is how the computer "sees" the first bootable active partition. If you set say sata 1 to be first in the boot order it will be the one that most OS's put the boot loader/mbr on.

If you go back and set sata 2 to be the first boot device then when you install another OS that OS now thinks that sata 2 is the first bootable active partition and loads the boot loader and mbr on it. The old sata 1 will now appear to the new OS as the second OS.

Normally when I play with OS's it tend to select the bootable drive in bios and set it to the first in the order. Then I install an OS on it. If I want to do another OS on another drive I then reset the order in bios. It acts like a new system.

NOW, you could leave it all as to some order and keep installing OS's that way. They may or may not fully do what you expect but they have become better over the years but I still don't trust the installers.

Hope that helps.

1 members found this post helpful.

I thinking about doing my dual-booting the 1st hdd after resizing if I boot from disc doesn't debian see the active partition? If so all I would need to do is load to free space, which leads to next question at the end you're prompted to load grub or grub-legacy, would either of these work with another os?

Thank you Jefro and everyone who's been assisting. I was leaning towards booting from another drive as I believe it is easier but that's not what I'm trying to accomplish. I'm here to learn all that I can so I'm going to dual-boot the one drive. This is actually where I got my introduction to linux when I infected laptop wiped out hd, only difference is new computer new hd, still playin around with laptop and Dell Optiplex gx-1

I think the best way it to play with it over and over. Can't say how many times I have wrecked stuff either by my mistake or other reasons.

If you really want to be safe then run a virtual machine. It would fly on that system and you would never have to worry about this or that. Simply make OS's and run them all at the same time.

The os I installed is windows7 upon installation I didn't see an option to set partition size so I installed on whole drive. I didn't realize that file system was ntfs until I went to resize partition on 1Tb drive. I could only shrink to 50% approx 471Gb, I'm trying to get it down to 250, because I'll never need that much space.

1.Is there anything I can do to resize?
2. If I run Debian installation disk when it gets to the partitioning schemes, nothing happens unless I commit to write changes to disc am I correct?
3. If I am correct then I can see if Debian recognizes the primary & unallocated space(partition) and either commit or abort.

Thank you for your assistance.