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
|