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I Purchased the ASUS P5B-VM SE motherboard, Intel Quad Core processor (2.4Ghz), 4GB of DDR800 RAM and 2 x WD 250GB Sata hard drives. I’m install Centos 5.1 X86_64 on it.

Here are the list of issues I had with this board and how I fixed them.
1.) Can’t read the Centos install DVD or CD.
2.) Strange mmconf and acpi problems at boot. (Before Redhat Nash appears)
3.) Onboard ethernet not detected by Centos 5.1.
4.) Sata hard drives detected as IDE. Drives added under /dev as hda, hdb etc. Should be sda, sdb.
5.) Ultra DMA isn’t working, so the drives transfer speed is awful.
6.) Bios and OS picking up only 3GB of RAM.

1.) Every installer disk I put in (DVD, CD, Centos, Fedora etc) would fail at the ISOLinux screen. Tried three different DVD-ROMS and the problem still occured.
Updating the bios to the latest version resolved this issue.

2.) To get rid of this I added “pci=nommconf” (without quotation marks). Some of the older Centos 5.1 kernels need you to pass “acpi=off” in order to boot. I recommend installing with “acpi=off”, upgrading to a later kernel, then removing “acpi=off” from grub.

3.) The board has a Attansic Technology Corp. L1 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter network chip. This doesn’t seem to be supported natively. Drivers are available on ftp://hogchain.net/pub/linux/attansic/vendor_driver/l1-linux-v1.2.40.2.tar.gz

Follow the instructions, and it’s easy to install.
Remember to yum install kernel-devel. You need the kernel source to compile the driver.

4 and 5.) I found the SATA drives were being detected as IDE drives in Centos. Instead of them coming up as sda, sdb, they were hda and hdb. Using hdparam -tT /dev/hda to do a transfer test showed the drive operating at 4MB/s…. which is very slow. They should be operating at near to 60Mb/s.
hdparam /dev/hda showed that DMA was disabled. Regardless of what I did, I couldn’t enable DMA on the drives.

Option 1: Enable AHCI in the Bios. Centos will then use the AHCI driver and everything detects correctly.

Option 2: Adding the following to the kernel boot parameter, either at the grub boot screen (press a key, goto the current kernel, go down to the entry with the word “kernel” in it and add the next part too the end) or in the /etc/grub.conf

ide0=noprobe ide1=noprobe

The generic libata driver (used for the JMicron JBxxx pata chip) is taking over the SATA drives on the Intel ICH8 Sata controller.
The noprobe statement basically disables the generic libata driver. You end up with the proper Intel Sata driver taking over.
Once you boot the drives will be /dev/sda /dev/sdb etc….
I got 55MB/s with the hdparam test once the correct driver was enabled.

6.) There is a option in the Bios (once you update) to enable a “memory remapping function”. I enabled this and the OS and BIOS picked up 4GB of RAM.
This only works if you run the 64-Bit version of Centos.
For the 32-Bit version, you need to install a PAE-Kernel.
yum install kernel-PAE <and then reboot>.

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