SørenBM Posted July 21, 2008 Share Posted July 21, 2008 Hi all, Just want to let you know of an issue I have had with the Abit AB9 Pro m/b. After upgrading from bios 16 to 22, my system would not boot, I only got to the screen where the name/model af the graphics card are displayed there after the screen went black. After consulting Abit's tech. support they advised me to buy a new bios chip. I took there advice and ordered a new bios chip with bios 22. One week later I got the chip, plugged it in... and... nothing... my system would still not boot. I wrote back to Abit's tech. support and asked if it could have something to do with me using a _old_ PCI graphics card. They answered that they could not test this, as they did not have a PCI graphics card lying around. Kindly they offered to send me a new chip with the bios 16 version. As I did not have patience to wait another week for a new chip, I went out and bought a new PCI Express graphics card. YES, now everything was working fine again. And then out I went to buy the unRAID Pro version I hope someone else out there can use my experience, if they should happen to be in the same situation. Kind regards, Søren Link to comment
Equilibrium Posted July 21, 2008 Share Posted July 21, 2008 That is strange, thank you for posting the information. I've never personally experienced any issues while using my Abit AB9 Pro with a PCI videocard. Many other users on this board have the exact same setup (most of which use BIOS 22). Link to comment
SSD Posted July 21, 2008 Share Posted July 21, 2008 I wrote back to Abit's tech. support and asked if it could have something to do with me using a _old_ PCI graphics card. They answered that they could not test this, as they did not have a PCI graphics card lying around. Can you post the brand name / graphics chipset of the old PCI card? Link to comment
SørenBM Posted July 27, 2008 Author Share Posted July 27, 2008 Can you post the brand name / graphics chipset of the old PCI card? Hi, It's an noname card with the S3 virge chipset (it says N1E3BD on the chip). Cheers, Søren Link to comment
Billped Posted July 31, 2008 Share Posted July 31, 2008 That certainly qualifies as "old" - your card was quite famous for being S3's first 3D graphics decelerator. Bill Link to comment
SørenBM Posted August 11, 2008 Author Share Posted August 11, 2008 Just a little update on this one. After wirting back and forth with Abit tech.support they asked me to test my PCI bus with another PCI card then my old PCI grahpics card. Abits HQ had been testing bios 22 with a PCI grahpics card and they didn't have any problems with this combination. This weekend I tested with another PCI card. This is what i worte back to Abit support: Hi, I have now had the chance to test with another PCI card (Adaptec AHA-2940UW SCSI PCI card). The card was not found in the post bios boot up process. This seemed really strange and got me thinking if it could be because of some of my settings in the bios. I have disabled everything in the bios i.e. Audio, lan1, floppy controller etc., because I’m running a command line based OS called unRAID based on Lnux Slackware that don’t make use of these features. I have saved my “customized” settings in a bios profile via ‘F6’ hence I decided to try and ‘Load Optimized Defaults’ The result: My Adaptec card was found! J I tried a coupled of times to load my own bios profile and ‘Load Optimized Defaults’ – every time my own bios profile was loaded the Adaptec card was not found. Then I decided to load my own bios profile and change one setting at a time. When I got to ”Integrated Peripherals” > “Onboard PCI Device” > “JMB363 SATA Controller” (which I have “Enabled”) I changed “- Controller Mode” to IDE-mode (which I had in AHCI-mode) then the PCI card would be found in the POST bios boot up process. I also tried switching back and forth between IDE and AHCI-mode a couple of times. Every time the mode was AHCI the Adaptec card was not found and every time the mode was IDE the Adaptec card was found. Then I decided to leave the mode = IDE, unplug the Adaptec card, unplug my PCI-e graphics card – and in with my old PCI graphics card. And then everything booted up just fine. This has been running fine for a day. Then just for the fun of it, I wanted to change back to AHCI-mode while I was using my old PCI graphics card and what do you know, everything still booted up just fine. I’m really confused as to what the issue might have been? To everyone that has this m/b: What mode are you running your JMB363 SATA Controller in? IDE og AHCI? And what are the difference? My unRAID works either way. Cheers, Søren Link to comment
jimwhite Posted August 11, 2008 Share Posted August 11, 2008 I had some very similar problems with PCI video when I got mine quite some time ago.... in fact, I RMA'd the first board because of it... I don't remember what I did to fix it, but like you, I remember it was something weird.... it also would not boot with my Gigabyte Fanless PCIe nVidia 8500.... but it booted fine with a cheapy PCIe 8400.... go figure... I run AHCI. Link to comment
Joe L. Posted August 11, 2008 Share Posted August 11, 2008 I did a google search, one post suggested adding pci=noacpi nobiospnp noapic nolapic to the syslinux.cfg file on the "append" line This line in syslinux.cfg: append initrd=bzroot rootdelay=10 should be changed to append initrd=bzroot rootdelay=10 pci=noacpi nobiospnp noapic nolapic You can edit the syslinux.cfg flie in Windows... it is on the root folder of the flash drive. Joe L. Link to comment
CrashnBrn Posted August 11, 2008 Share Posted August 11, 2008 I have an old voodo 3 pci card that I have in my abit ab9 pro. I have not had any problems booting in either IDE or ACHI mode. Currently I am using ACHI. Link to comment
SørenBM Posted August 13, 2008 Author Share Posted August 13, 2008 I did a google search, one post suggested adding pci=noacpi nobiospnp noapic nolapic to the syslinux.cfg file on the "append" line This line in syslinux.cfg: append initrd=bzroot rootdelay=10 should be changed to append initrd=bzroot rootdelay=10 pci=noacpi nobiospnp noapic nolapic You can edit the syslinux.cfg flie in Windows... it is on the root folder of the flash drive. Joe L. Joe, what should your suggestion do? I just got an anwser back from Abit: Dear customer, When you change hardware some things are re-allocated in the BIOS. It might be that some hardware got the same I/O address which will cause problems. Now you changed some settings in the BIOS and played a bit around with the hardware, so some things get re-located again. Kind regards Mit freundlichem Gruss Met vriendelijke groet Link to comment
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