Magic City VitaeLog

As I said in my last post, I've been having difficulties with my server. I recently gave in with my personal workstation, and parted it with stuff from my old server to make a new, supposedly better one. The problem is that my ASUS M2n32 SLI Deluxe board is pile. I've had it in for RMA once already, and it came back with almost all the capacitors bulging. That means that they are going to die, soon, and most likely take something with them when they do. I have thoughts that some part of the CPU is already dieing, and I have cheap ram sitting around. I figure if the thing blows up, it blows up.

So, I've been struggling with getting the two GigE ports to work on this beast in Linux. They did work, perfectly fine, as my workstation. They worked in Linux, in fact. Now that it is in a different room, they don't work. I tried downgrading the BIOS, and wham : The system locked up in the middle of the flash.

No problem, I've repaired bad BIOS's before. I hunt around and find that the thing has a 'crash proof' system. It seems to work, but when following the PUBLISHED documentation, I find that it errors out with a 'source file not found'. So much for that recovery.

I dig through ASUS's site to find myself so angry at their utter lack of proper English, and 'complete' documentation, that I walk away.

I come back to find somebody else's post about award bios recovery, stating that the BIOS file has to be named 'BIOS.BIN'. Surprise, it works. Nowhere, *NOWHERE* on ASUS's site does it say this. NOWHERE in the manual does it say this.

So, I'm back up, with two 'addon' NIC's in there, and the onboard GigE ports disabled. In all, I think I wasted 3 hours finding VERY simple instructions on some other dude's blog about how to recover all different types of BIOS failures. Thanks to that Dude. I don't have his site anymore... else I'd link to him.

what fun.