Asrock 939Dual-SATA2 Motherboard Strangeness
Robert L Cochran <[email protected]> Tue, 27 Dec 2005 22:56:59 -0500
| Newsgroups | gmane.linux.redhat.amd64 |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
This is a followup to my earlier emails in which I've expressed interest in AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual core processors and appropriate motherboards for same. I'm the pleased owner of an X2 4400 now, it is installed on an Asrock 939Dual-SATA2 motherboard. I'm puzzled about 2 issues with this motherboard. #1 -- I also installed a Plextor PX-716SA DVD-RW drive. This is an SATA drive and I can't boot off it with a bootable DVD. The drive is installed on the motherboard's SATA2 connector (this is a plain SATA connector, item #13 on page 2 of the manual. It is not item #10, "Serial SATAII connector", the red one.) There is also a PATA Sony DVD-RW drive plugged into the secondary IDE connector, motherboard item #16. I can boot from this, fortunately. Each time I press the power button, I get a BIOS POST message telling me to reboot and select a new boot drive or press a key to continue. Pressing any one key causes the message to repeat. Rebooting with CTRL-ALT-DEL will then bring up the Grub splash screen, and the system boots. Any comments about this? #2 -- I'm interpreting the PLED pins of the System Panel Header (item #17 on page 2 of the manual) to mean Power LED. On my Lian Li case, the Power LED wires are 2 wires in a 3-pin connector. The middle connector pin is empty. Yet, the PLED pins on the motherboard header are for a 2-pin connector. But wait! Just to the left of it is the Chassis Speaker Header, item #18, and if you look closely, there is text saying something like "PWRLED" or some such and there are 3 wave-soldered holes on the motherboard right next to the Chassis Speaker Header. I'm confused about where to plug in the Power LED connector. Any comments? One final note. If you get this motherboard for yourself and install Fedora Core 4 on it, be sure to have the latest glibc and kernel-smp rpm's and install them right after the Fedora install, so that you will have networking available from the onboard NIC. The system seems very nice -- I'm using it now, restoring backed up data to the new drive. The 4400 processor seems nice and speedy. Thanks Bob Cochran Greenbelt, Maryland, USA