K8N-SLI, 939 question

[hotdog453]

Howdy guys.

 

Looking to get a 10-13 drive unRAID setup, but checking out some of the motherboards I have on hand first... rather not buy if I don't have to, ya know ?

 

Anyhoogle, the one board I have in mind is an MSI K8N-SLI, 939 motherboard. According to the list of supported mobos, it works (or at least the K8N-Neo 4 does).

 

It boots from the USB drive with no problem. However, it hangs at "loading bzimage....." with a flashing cursor, and doesn't move from there.

 

Now, it could have been that I simply didn't wait long enough. How long SHOULD it take? It booted up damn near instant on another board I tried, a G965 Intel board. Is it a problem on my end (hardware wise?) or was I just too anxious? In all reality, I probably only let it go for 5 minutes, but it never changed, so I figured there was a problem.

 

Thanks for ANY info!

[Joe L.]

It should not take 5 minutes to load bzimage.  It appears as if the bios on that motherboard is having a tough time booting from that flash drive.

 

A few things you can try:

1. Try a different flash drive.  It could be the "geometry" of your existing flash drive is not compatible with your motherboard.  I was unable to boot my new 1 Gig flash drive on my motherboard until I changed its geometry to one the bios could handle, even though the same flash drive booted my laptop just fine. My older, original, 128 Meg flash drive worked perfectly fine in both.

 

I had to set the geometry of my sandisk 1Gig  USB  drive before my bios would boot at all on it on my Intel motherboard, even though it would boot on my laptop.  (I did this while booted up on my old 128 Meg flash drive, but you could use any "live" distribution of Linux)

 

in any case, here are my threads... including how I finally configured my flash drive... it is set as a FS type "e" using the advanced more of fdisk in linux.  (same FS type that the HP formatting tool uses)

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=359.0

and

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=366.0

 

2. See if a bios update is available for your motherboard.  If so, it might be ablle to boot unRaid after it is updated.

 

Joe L.

[hotdog453]

Hmmm... I'll try a different flash drive first, see if that works. I have enough of them lying around.

 

Just seems like an odd problem, to get THAT far then die, hehe.

 

I'll let you know what I find: And thanks for the info!