[clug] Re: Linux on Asus P5GD1 motherboard

[Alex Satrapa]

On 22 Aug 2005, at 12:54, Alex Satrapa wrote:

> To anyone who reads this message (especially if you came here from  
> Google): I would recommend that you avoid this motherboard like the  
> plague. The Asus P5GD1 is - in my opinion based on my experience -  
> a heap of stinking poo.

One of my colleages at work apparently wondered how much of a pile  
this pile is. The main issue I have with this motherboard is the  
difficulty of using the single IDE channel.

It turns out that if you preinstall your operating system onto an IDE  
hard drive, you can boot using that hard drive. Otherwise, you can  
use the single channel for what appears to be its intended purpose,  
which is to run the optical drive (ie: CD, DVD, CD-R, DVD-RW, etc)  
(the presence of said optical drive is unquestioned).

Alternately, you can boot from an installer CD that knows about the  
ITE RAID subsystem, and install the operating system onto the RAID.  
This would then leave you booting from the ITE RAID.

It may be that all of the hard drives and CD-ROMs that I have access  
to are just not right for that IDE controller, and someone else has  
this motherboard working fine with different brands/speeds of CD and  
HDD - I'd love to know what works.

> I have not yet managed to get the system to provide Linux with  
> access to a single P-ATA hard drive plugged into the ITE RAID  
> controller - this is probably understandable.

Totally understandable when you realise that regardless of the mode  
it's configured for, the ITE RAID always presents a SCSI interface to  
Linux (and this revelation is spoken with a mouthful of humble pie,  
while wiping the remains of egg from my face, being as obvious as it  
is in hindsight). I won't explore this further, since I've come as  
far as I need to, but it appears that if you want to boot an  
operating system that wasn't preinstalled on your hard drive (and  
simultaneously able to deal with the ITE RAID), you'll need to boot  
it from CD attached to the single IDE interface to install the O/S on  
the drive(s) attached to the IDE or SATA ports of the ITE RAID.

> This motherboard caused me that much grief that I will most likely  
> avoid Asus products in the future unless the person selling me the  
> complete system can show it running my operating system of choice.

I still stick by that - if anyone can show me their setup with this  
motherboard booting from a hard drive on the IDE interface with a CD- 
ROM also connected, I'd love to hear how you did it. You shouldn't  
have to watch out for stuff like this (imagine if you had to remove  
the driver's seat from your car in order to put petrol in the tank).  
Anyway, I've decided that it's not so much broken as misunderstood.  
I'm now off to install Linux on this brok... misunderstood computer's  
three siblings.

Alex Satrapa             M: +61 4 0770 5332
grail at goldweb.com.au     W: http://homepage.mac.com/alexsatrapa

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