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[LUG] Tip from the confused.

 

I built a new server for work this weekend. Nice athlon64-x2 4800. 80GB 
IDE, root, usr, var and home drive, 400gb sata for specific data.

All fine. POSTs. Boot to CD of latest Debian testing netinst.

Follow through the install, grab several main packages - leave it alone 
to download and install for several hours. Come back - it's finished, 
giving me the final "remove cd and reboot" prompt.

Do so. Boot failure. Not even a grub prompt. So I figure the grub 
install has failed, or the partition isn't set active. I reboot to cd, 
fix that, verify boot flag with cfdisk - try again, same. Reinstall grub 
a few times - nothing. I try some old IDE drives to see if the 
mobo/controller is narfed. They work fine.

Prize to anyone who knows what the problem was...

On one of the boots, I noticed some error messages flash past before 
being hidden by the curses install screens. I flipped across the alt+f2 
and dmesg|more to see what they were. They were complaining of DMA 
failure on that device.

Turns out, when building the machine, I'd re-used the ide cable that was 
in the case. It wasn't ATA/100 and the data was being corrupted as it 
was written. The install software was hiding, or not reporting, the 
errors so all appeared well. No write error occured during the install 
that was shown to me.

I replaced the cable with the new one that came with the mobo and the 
grub menu appeared - but then failed a boot due to the corruption. 
However, a second full reinstall worked fine. The other IDE drives 
worked since they were older.

Something new to me, worth bearing in mind if building a new box.


By the way - for the curious, the X2 Athlons are great. These are AMD's 
dual-core beasts and yes, they work as spec. They do need a SMP kernel 
to make full use, debian at least doesn't assign one by default but 
there is a recent Athlon SMP kernel in the main package lists - just 
pick it with dselect and it will install automatically. Reboot and you 
have two processors. htop gives accurate usage per cpu. It just works! 
(This is using a 32-bit kernel mind, some software I run doesn't work 
too great in 64-bit mode) It runs cool (32-40c with the retail hs/fan) 
and if like the other athlons I use, will be rock solid.

"Total of 2 processors activated (8853.98 BogoMIPS)."  Nice :)

-- 
Simon Avery

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