"funny" ASUS P5A-B-AT motherboard

Bob Blick bblick at saber.net
Thu Aug 3 23:07:15 PDT 2000


Hi everyone,

I've been scratching my head a little about this one. Two problems:

1. Lilo does not work. Sticks at LI no matter what I put in lilo.conf. I've
tried with and without linear, appending the drives geometry, putting it in
the master boot record and also in the first active partition. This is a
dual-boot machine so currently I just use loadlin so it's not a real
problem, but curious.

2. Only 64 meg ram shows up. I though this was a pre-2.0 kernel thing. If
lilo worked I could append something in there, but I also tried passing a
memory line to loadlin and didn't get any complaints(but still only 64 meg
ram). Could not find any documentation for loadlin so I bet I did it wrong,
it's the first time I used anything but lilo. The bios has a "OS/2 > 64
meg" switch but that drops the displayed ram to 16 meg.

This is the system:
ASUS P5A-B/AT motherboard (socket 7)
Onboard CMI8330 audio that hogs 2 interrupts but is a handy aural disk
activity indicator :-(
350MHz AMD K6-2 running 100 MHz bus
96 meg ram(3 32 meg SDRAM DIMMS)
TNT RIVA AGP video card with 16 meg SDRAM
3Com 3c905 PCI network card
hda is WD 10 gig ultra ATA set as LBA in bios with Win95 installed
hdb is an ATA Iomega Zip drive
hdc is a WD 2.1 gig EIDE set as CHS in bios, RedHat 6.2(hdc1 is /boot, 17
megs)
hdd is a generic EIDE cdrom drive

Any suggestions welcome. At this point I'm curious about the Lilo problem,
but would really like to solve the memory issue. The system test reports 96
meg at start, and Windows finds all 96 meg, just not Linux. I have a
machine at work running RedHat 5.2 and it finds all its memory, so I tend
to think it's a chipset issue that I can patch somehow, or if there's a way
to pass parameters to loadlin I'm all ears.

Thanks,

Bob




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