I downloaded the opensuse 11.0 KDE CD from both a mirror and bitorrent, and both have good md5 sums. When I burn the cd and perform a “media check” on a couple of good computers they pass, so the cd is fine. But when I take the CD drive and ribbon cable from those working computers and plug them into a server with an intel STL2 motherboard with a PIII the media check fails! It fails at the same place each time its run on the same drive, but in a different place on a different drive. memcheck is also fine.
The computer has fedora installed on it and I think that runs fine, though i dont know the login. A DSL cd loads and runs fine, but ubuntu will not.
Am I doing something wrong for this kind of motherboard? Its my first experiance with a server motherboard. I am working on updating the BIOS/FRUSDR/BMC, but some of that is also new to me and giving me problems as well.
Please, I hope someone has some advice, as I much prefer opensuse to DSL
Hmm, I’d carefully check the 12V and 5V voltages and make sure the FSB (and the PCI bus) is not overclocked. Also, check out the BIOS IDE PIO/DMA settings and maybe try dropping them down a notch (to 66 or 33 MHz).
The STL2 is an Intel dual socket 370 , Pentium 3 CPU motherboard taking CPUs up to 1.0 Ghz. You will find CPUs 933 Mhz and higher very difficult to install due to the heat sinks. Start from a cold boot. Enter the BIOS. Get the BIOS version. Compare it to the info on …intel.com Look under legacy / retired systems. try
Intel® Server Board STL2 - Intel® Server Board STL2 support
look under software & drivers … Latest BIOS updates… V 1.13.
there have been problems with other Intel server boards vis a vis SCSI boot. IS stl2_tps.pdf page 72 Fig 5-1 “U” CPU speed jumper present and correctly set ??
Note on Page 77 you can force 133 Mhz FSB on jumper 1J15…
maybe a memory stick is mislabeled 133…
Thanks for the replies and in depth research. I still think its weird that this is a problem with some distros and not with others. But I guess its probably more of a hardware problem. Hopefully those here can still help me.
I updated the BMC, the BIOS, and the FRU/SDR and reset the CMOS (took forever. would you believe the floppy drive died between updating the BIOS and FRU/SDR?) I set the jumpers to force the CPU speed as 800mhz for my dual coppermine SL4CD CPUs, and tried disabling the 133 mhz fsb, but no change. I’ve tried with just one or with 2 cpus. The Bios doesn’t have anything in way of overclocking or changing the voltages. I’ve tried unplugging all unnecessary peripherals to make sure its not a power problem, but I guess I could try putting a volt meter to a molex. I’m not sure what BIOS IDE PIO/DMA settings are, but I don’t see anything like it in the BIOS.
Well, I meant your hard drive/optical drive interface. I assumed it was IDE/ATA, but of course it may be SATA or SCSI. I’d check it’s not overheating or even dying. Other than that, you could disconnect any ISA/PCI cards – except your graphics card – just to make sure there’s no IRQ conflict.
You are correct, It is an IDE drive. I see now where to change the settings for a specific device. I’ve tried several combinations from the little research I was able to do to get a better understanding, but would appreciate any suggestions for the correct combination
Multi-Section Transfers: Disabled,2,4,16
LBA Mode Control: Enabled,Disabled
32 bit I/O: Enabled,Disabled
Transfer Mode: Standard,Fast PIO 1,2,3,4,FPIO3/DMA1,FPIO4/DMA2
Ultra DMA Mode: Disabled, Mode 0, Mode 1, Mode 2
PIO 1 caused the failure much earlier, nothing else i tried helped. I only have 40 wire cables, so I stayed away from UDMA 1 or 2. The Drive is a Samsung CD Master 40E Model SC-140, but googling that didn’t offer me much insight.
Also, unplugging all PCI cards didn’t help. I may try a network install disk, as this drive will read up to 29% of a disk. the other drive fails at 1%. Is there any way to start a network install from a floppy?
If your mobo and drives aren’t very old, the settings should be:
Multi-Section Transfers: Not a clue, maybe leave it at Disabled?
LBA Mode Control: Enabled
32 bit I/O: Enabled
Transfer Mode: Fast PIO 4,FPIO4/DMA2
Ultra DMA Mode: Mode 2
Anyway, there’s usually a setting in BIOS to enable auto-detection and/or auto-configuration and/or to load failsafe defaults: in my opinion, that would be your best bet. As for a network install, I’m afraid I have no experience whatsoever with that.
Still no luck. Thanks for your help though. I will try a variety of other distros with live cds to see if I can find any similarities. So far, **** Small Linux works fine, but Ubuntu just exits out to a console for whatever option I choose and opensuse fails to mount cd filesystem and fails the media check.
