smp kernel boot problem
 

I just installed 9.2 on my new machine (Soyo i865PE Dragon2+ (intel 865PE chipset,) onboard 6channel sound (ac97) onboard lan, hyperthreaded p4 2.6ghz) and ran into an interesting issue when it came time to boot.
Although I was impressed that mdk supposedly autoconfigured and installed the smp support, the screen will hang at the following last few lines:

creating root device
mounting root fs w/flags erros=remount -ro,defaults
hdb-dma-intr status=0x51 DriveReady SeekCompleteError
hdb-dma-intr error=0x84 DriveStatus Error BadCRC

(note i've got mdk on the 2nd hard disk and windows on the first)

loading the normal kernel or the failsafe seems to bypass this (although these messages appear, the system continues, with the next message reading "ide reset" or something of that nature.

I've been experiencing some odd bios-related behavior on this drive, could this be the problem?

Fielding Isaacs

Yes it could very well be the problem. If the bios missreports the size and layout of the disk lilo and consiquently mandrake can't use it.
What bios problems are you having?
Have you switched cables to test that yet?
Have you checked the battery and changed it yet to make sure the bios is keeping the hardware settings?
Have you run a manufacturers hard drive checking program yet?

a few answers...
Well, the bios (which is either phoenix or ami award...the manufacturer said one thing (ami) but the bios says another (phoenix)) has given me problems when set to either failsafe or optimal. On optimal It wouldn't allow windows XP to format a drive to ntfs...but for whatever reason it seemed like on failsafe mandrake and knoppix both would format a drive, and begin installation, but die in installation claiming to be unable to read from the drives. (switching back to optimal fixed this) I just bought the board a few days ago, (and its less than a year in the market) so i suspect a bios-bug that is available on the latest bios-updates can be fixed.
also, knoppix seemed to only detect the hyperthreading when optimal bios settings were used.

the bios battery is working fine and does save settings.

don't have manufacturers hard-drive checker at the moment (the drive was bought via tigerdirect with nothing but the static-bag surrounding it.

Just in case anyone's used this board before, i'm also hitting some sound problems, mainly it seems that mdk detected things fine, kscd can read a disk, but totem (for whatever reason the only media player that installed) will play an mp3 (no sound server error messages) but nothing comes out of the speakers.

Finally, has anyone seen a good control panel program for the ac'97 sound cards to control whether i'm using 2, 4 or 6 of the available channels...?

Fielding Isaacs

Please list all you hardware and the layout of it. It sounds like you don't have either the jumper pins on the hard drive correct for master/slave or the bios needs to be set differently( maybe LBA or sonething like that) for the harddrive.
Make sure aly PNP or plug and plau options are turned off in the bios. Windows doesn't need them either.