Making a L440GX+ work (was "Trying to revive a server... AIC-7896 freezes pre-POST completion")

[Derek Ragona]

The halt could be anything from bad RAM, or other IRQ issues.  This begs 
the question as to why this board is not in use?

You should be able to update the BIOS from a floppy or cd-rom boot 
disk.  You can take your pick at bootdisk.org

The general rule with ram is you can run faster ram than you need, just 
usually wastes money that faster RAM costs.  But speed isn't the only issue 
with ram, some are ECC or non-ECC, plus the CAS timing can be 
different.  So your RAM while it seems to work,may not be quite right.

         -Derek



At 03:27 PM 6/14/2006, Garrett Cooper wrote:
>Derek Ragona wrote:
>>IF you can find the documentation for the motherboard, see if there is a 
>>reset jumper.  That jumper should reset the BIOS to factory defaults to 
>>allow it to get through the post and into setup.  Some motherboards 
>>actually take you into setup with the jumper moved to reset bad configurations.
>>Also, unplug any cards and drives, leave the system board with just ram 
>>and cpu and video (unless it is built in) until you get it configured.
>>         -Derek
>>
>>At 12:11 AM 6/14/2006, Garrett Cooper wrote:
>>>Hello again all,
>>>         I know this isn't a FreeBSD question really, but I just started 
>>> up a motherboard with onboard SCSI (Adaptec AIC-7896), and for some odd 
>>> reason it freezes pre-POST before it attempts to boot and there isn't 
>>> any way where I can get into the BIOS to change the settings it seems. 
>>> Does anyone know how I can maybe disable the onboard SCSI controller 
>>> since it appears to hang while detecting disks?
>>>         Thanks a million!
>>>-Garrett
>
>         Thanks all for the help. It turns out after a bit of researching 
> and seeing some numbers on boot, I was able to find the documentation for 
> the motherboard. It's an L440GX+ motherboard which does appear to still 
> work properly, but here's the clincher. I read that the processors I have 
> installed are compatible (2xP3 600E CPUs), _but_ only if the BIOS is 
> updated past a particular version and I don't know if that is true or 
> not. Plus I don't know what is causing the thing to halt because it 
> appears to work on occasion--got the system to boot once but halted it 
> since I couldn't get into the BIOS and change the settings. I cleared the 
> CMOS--both by setting the jumper and removing the battery, and all it 
> appears to have done superficially is make the original splash screen 
> come up during boot.
>         So, my question is has anyone experienced anything like this and 
> if so how did you solve this problem, or does anyone know how to fix this 
> situation apart from (maybe) installing Windows and updating the BIOS 
> with a different processor?
>         Also, I have a horde of PC133 SD RAM and only one stick of PC100 
> RAM, which doesn't appear to work in the motherboard, and the motherboard 
> is rated to _only_ support PC100 SD RAM. Is it all right for me to use 
> RAM which is rated 33MHz faster than recommended? I think it's possible 
> with some motherboards but I'm not sure about this one.
>         Thanks again for all your help guys :).
>-Garrett
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