[vox-tech] Abit motherboard

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Peter Jay Salzman (p at dirac.org):

> Haven't been able to install Linux on it yet.  I'm trying very hard to
> keep everything on SATA, but unfortunately, that's proving to be quite
> challenging. 

Hi, Peter.

>From a remark further down in your post, I'm gathering that this is an
Abit NFS7-S Socket A Athlon/Duron motherboard, right?  Isn't that a
model that uses an nVidia nForce II chipset, and thus an Nvidia MCP2-T
South Bridge?

(/me checks on-line references further.)

 I've got two SATA drives:

There's SATA, and there's SATA.  The compatibility isn't determined at
all by the hard drive, but rather by the host adapter chipset -- which
in this case is integral to your motherboard.

The NFS7-S is claimed to have considerable potential for overclocking
(official FSB frequencies of 100-237 MHz), AGP 8x slot, Realtek RTL8801B
100Base-T ethernet, Realtek ALC650 sound chip, gets good mileage out of
DDR333 SD-RAM (via dual-channel memory support), AGP vs. FSB vs. RAM
clock speeds all independently adjustable.  Seems like a classic gamer
motherboard:  Lots of CPU and RAM power, relatively weak on everything
else.  

The Serial ATA connetivity is provided by two connectors hanging off a
Silicon Image SiI3112A chip.  

I'm not clear from your description on which driver (siimage,
silraid/ataraid, medley/ataraid, or sata_sil) you're using to drive the
SiI3112A3112A3112A.  You mentioned only that you were using "Knoppix".

You might have much, much better luck with a different driver.  (Me, I'd
go for sata_sil.)  I happen to have a page where I track Linux support
for the various SATA chipsets.  'Serial ATA" on
http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Hardware/ 

I hope that helps.

-- 
Cheers,           find / -user your -name base -print | xargs chown us:us
Rick Moen
rick at linuxmafia.com