Gah.. Fallen at the first hurdle....

I believe several ASUS P5 series boards have compatibility problems with Linux.

I'm sorry to say you are not alone :-(

http://forumz.tomshardware.com/sof [...] 34292.html

We have seen several of these issues recently.


Updating your BIOS may help, if you have not done so already. I would advise you to save your old BIOS because you may have to restore it.


Some possible solutions:

0. use the following kernel parameters at the boot: prompt

noapic acpi=off

1. try disabling things using these kernel options on this page http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/inst [...] dware.html

2. use the Silicon Image SATA controller with SATA to PATA converters if you have to

3. try the JMicron controller -- strike that - do not bother

4. disable everything you can in the BIOS and see if that helps

5. try a Knoppix LiveCD

6. disable ACPI in the BIOS

7. get a new board

GL :-D


PS Maybe this link will help: http://www.hentges.net/misc/howtos/p5wdh/index.shtml

Do you have another VGA card you can use for the initial install?

It doesn't matter if it's very basic, even an ancient 32bit PCI card with 8MB of VRAM will work.

After you get Ubuntu or FC6 installed and you download the updates + the nVidia driver everything should work just fine :-D

I can try to help more via PM or IM if you want.

GL :-D

What else do you have gathering dust?

Heh... I only have one decent monitor though, without filling my desk with hulking great 22" CRTs.

Windows doesnt like both cards at once as the 8800 series has its own drivers that refuse to co-exist with the 7900GT drivers. Plus, with the two of them in so much memory address space is mapped that Win x86 only sees 2.6GB. Although I am running x64 now so I may have a play...

Anyway, Ubuntu installed with the 7900GT in place, I had a few issues though...

Firstly, it insisted on using the wrong ethernet connction for web access. Even disabling the offending adaptor (that only links to my neighbours router so that he can access my storage drive) and manually setting up the other (I have a /29 IP block so no NAT is involved), it still insisted on trying to connect to computers in the 10.0.0.XX range whenever I tried to do a DNS lookup, ping, etc.... I solved this by disconnecting the unwanted LAN cable and rebooting.

However I still could not connect to websites with Firefox (it would just say "connecting" ). Ping worked, and I could traceroute to tomshardware.com, but no sites (even google.com) would open. The mail client did the same.

I figured maybe I needed new LAN drivers, and popped in my P5W DH CD in the hopes that it had Linux drivers on... it did!

They were gzipped, so I looked for somewhere on the hdd to unzip them... seems I dont have write access many places, I suppose thats because I'm not logged in as root... finally found somewhere.

The readme.txt tells me I have to run "install.sh" now... open a console, have fun trying to navigate to the relevent directory (I vaguely remember using Slackware 2.0 on a 486 for like a few hours years ago, so I have a vague idea of commands. Take about 10 mins trying to remember the Linux equivalent of "dir", have a vague recollection of "list" or "lst", but to no avil. Turns our "dir" works. Silly me....). Try to run install.sh...

"Access Denied".... This is worse than Vista UAC!

Decide to try to log in as root, but it seems Ubuntu didnt ask me to set a password for root, and its not blank or the same as my other password. Finally figure out that I have to set the permissions on the file under my normal login to allow it to be run.

Finally get to running the file. It errors. I give up.

Back to Win XP for now

I spent another hour or so fiddling with Ubuntu.

nVidia drivers - Cant get them to install. If I just run them it says they need to be run as root, it wont let me log in as root. Cant find a way to run them with root permissions. The add/remove packages thing doesnt seem to want to open them in any way. The nVidia drivers that come with Ubuntu dont support G80.

LAN - No longer convinced I need drivers. I can run a full traceroute to anywhere or perform a DNS lookup fine via the "network tools" section. Firefox will access my routers Web interface. No other websites can be accessed by Firefox. GAIM wont connect. Mail client wont connect. Its like it is ignoring the gateway address I have entered.

Ethernet controller is set up the same as it is in Windows, although I use DCHP in windows. IP 87.127.89.xxx, subnet 255.255.255.248, Gateway 87.127.89.xxx.

As I've said its on a block of 8 IPs so firewalls etc shouldnt be an issue... Hell WinXP shows the router (via UPnP) as a "Linux IGD gateway device" so I assume thats running some imbedded form of Linux.

I gave up with Ubuntu and managed to install Fedora Core 6... however while it installed fine, it hangs on boot, attempting to "Read all disks" or something, and throwing errors up at me. The only drives connected at the time were my SATA drive with Linux on (on the ICH7R controller) and my Plextor PX-760SA SATA DVD±RW drive, also on the ICH7R controller.

I'm beat tbh... the one annoying thing is that FC6 installed Grub with like a 1 second timeout to boot linux.... is there a way to restore the XP x64 bootloader so that I can get rid of Linux?

EDIT: Googling tells me to run fdisk /mbr... but as far as I'm aware fdisk doesnt exist in Windows XP x64... which is nice.

EDIT2: Sorted it