[mythtv-users] Yet another motherboard Grrr. The ASUS M2N-MX SE PLUS

[Colin McGregor]

This mailing list has had a number of motherboard issues over the last
little bit, and I am afraid I am adding yet one more grumble to the
lot...

My goal is to get an upstairs diskless frontend box up and running
Knoppmyth off a downstairs frontend/backend box, but so far I am
running into issues...

The motherboard, as noted in the subject line is an ASUS M2N-MX SE
PLUS motherboard, equipped with 1 GB of RAM and an AMD Athlon 64 3200+
(single core). The BIOS is the latest available from the ASUS support
website (version 0503). When booting with Knoppmyth (Release 5 F27) I
see two error messages:

PCI: BIOS Bug: MCFG area at e0000000 is not E-820-reserved
PCI: Not using MMCONFIG
0000:00:07.0 Invalid Mac address detected: b5:52:17:C6:1f:00
Please complain to your hardware vendor. Switching to a random MAC.

So far I have been unable to get the box to successfully boot off the
network. In a quest to find where the issue(s) are I did connect a 40
GB EIDE hard drive and an EIDE CD-ROM reader to the motherboard.

Booting with the "knoppmyth noacpi" option does allow me to seemingly
successfully install Knoppmyth, but once installed I am unable to
successfully boot.  On the other hand running the Mythbuntu 7.10 live
CD will successfully boot, if painfully slowly...

Possibly unrelated (but still an annoyance), I have tried installing
an ASUS PCIe GeForce 6200 video card into the system. Even with the
BIOS set to give first priority to the PCIe slot, the machine insists
on just using the on-board video...

What am I missing? Also, when I attempt to talk to ASUS's Linux
technical support line again on Monday (I did try to get in touch with
them Friday mid-afternoon without success) what should I be grumbling
about, if anything?

Thanks,


Colin McGregor