Hey All,

 

I have a bunch of old socket 370 boards around the house and a second pro key sitting in back-up on my server. Has anybody tried out an ASUS CUSL2 board in the past. I have been playing around using the latest 1014 beta 1 bios which is the latest on the ASUS web-site. I know it is possible in this era of board to boot from USB as I have an intel board p3 866 in my wife's desktop machine (I love her but I don't like her much - LOL) anyhow. If I go to the bios on that intel board there is a "boot from USB" selection.

 

So it maybe something asus did not program into the bios for this board. They made a bunch of boards with the 815E chipsets and I am trying to find one by searching the manuals on Asus's web-site to see if there is one that does boot from USB and then try to flash the bios. I notice that all the CUSL2 model boards use the same 1014 beta 1 bios same date stamp.

 

It would be cool to use this. it will take 512 mb memory in three slot at 133. it has p3 1000 at 133 for processor and I have 4 or 5 ide drives lying around the house that I could make a data server out of it and keep people out of my mainstream unraid media server.

 

so! it has 2 ide ports on board for 4 drives and I could install a 4 port pci ide or sata card to expand past that. heck it has 5 pci slots so I could add a few of those cards.  no on board lan so I installed a 10/100/1 Intel PCI Nic I have laying around. just testing right now if I could find an ASUS bios for a board with the 815e that did boot from USB I would try flashing this board with it, if it fails oh well it was just collecting dust anyhow.

 

any thoughts.

 

 

For the record, It is possible to boot UNRAID from one of the hard drives.

You can also boot from a compact flash with an IDE adapter.

Granted you give up an IDE port, but the possibility exists.

You will still need the flash key for data access/storage, you just will be booting from a different device.

 

I'm thinking of playing with a grub boot floppy to access the rest of the boot process from one of the internal hard drives.

 

I actually have this board, maybe I'll play with it this weekend and see if I can get it to boot from the USB key.

 

 

Hey WeeboTech,

 

I cannot get it up on the ASUS from the Flash, I have tried the two port on the board and the 2 on the riser card as well as the third shared slot on the riser card.

 

I did get it to boot on the Intel board in my wife's desktop. the difference i see is in the intel bios you can turn on USB booting and then when you got to the boot priority list and select hard drives it see the Kingston Data traveller as a device you then just disable the existing IDE drive (as a boot device) and set the kingston as #1 priority it boots and loads up no problems waiting for my command. It also found all the devices in that box. Intel Nic, SB AWE64 and the intel IDE controller. so I would assume it would work I did not try and log into the tower in case i wrote something to her XP loaded IDE drive.

 

SO I think that if we could find a new asus bios that supports the mentioned above it would work or a modified one. I am not sure what the shared USB port on the riser card does. I have looked through the manual but cannot find any info on it.

 

NOW! the one thing I did notice on the intel board when actually booting is it very slow to boot reading and loading the two linux files once read it zooms through the build.

 

Regards,

 

DVS

 

 

Hi, I tried booting from the USB flash also on that board.

 

It did not work for me.

 

After I thought about it, I do not believe it to be a worthy candidate. (unless the use is really minimal)

 

It only accepts 512M of ram.

Considering the root filesystem is in ram, plus the kernel, you'll have just a lil bit of memory left for applications and caching.

 

I'm sure it's possible to get it running

I would suggest another board.

Albeit booting from USB,  a scrap hard drive or a kicker boot cd.

Ability to accept ram over 512M may become an issue (if not today, then in the future).

Therefore, you will be upgrading eventually.

 

> one thing I did notice on the intel board when actually booting is it very slow to boot reading and loading the two linux files once read it zooms through the build.

USB 1.1 and a large file...

It's slow on a number of machines I tried.