ASUS P4P800 MB FC3 Crashing

[Ken Smith]

Strong wrote:

>On Thu, 2005-09-08 at 16:09 -0400, Claude Jones wrote:
>  
>
>>>This is a reliability question. I have a system config'd as
>>>      
>>>
>>follows:-
>>    
>>
>>>1) ASUS P4P800 MB
>>>2) 1G Memory
>>>3) Matrox Video
>>>4) 3Ware Escalade SATA Raid controller
>>>5) FC3
>>>      
>>>
>The problem here is in chipset... I do not remember exactly which of FCs
>didn't work (FC1 or FC3) on this motherboard... But I saw it was written
>(i think it was FC3) in the release-notes or whatever, that on some
>motherboards of this series it may not work. But it is unlike with FC4.
>So, You have three choices here:
>1) Use FC4;
>2) Use FC2;
>3) Change Your motherboard.
>
>  
>
Thanks for all the input. I found the RH Bugzilla report.There seems to 
be some subtle problem with Linux and this MB.

Does any one know the basic cause of the problem or whether there is any 
reason to think that FC4 onward will be any more stable on this MB? Or 
have we found a M$ only MB? (A WinMB).  I have one running W2K without 
problems.

So I suspect the basic ability to fetch instructions from memory and 
execute them is working fine. Otherwise nothing will run. So it would 
seem to me to be a subtle issue between a driver and the hardware that 
is bringing the system down. So unless one of the drivers has changed I 
don't see why this MB would become reliable.

Eth0 is a 3com chip.With FC1 and the original Linux driver released by 
ASUS, it produced corrupt packets. ICMP Ping would work but port 53 DNS 
packets were corrupt - so the network 'sort of' worked. I found another 
driver (Sysconnect I think) that worked better. If that driver is flaky 
then it could be the heart of the problem but it could be any of the 
drivers at fault. Whatever it is, it kills the system fundamentally - no 
log report, no kernel panic - just instant death. I lack the diagnostic 
tools to debug driver/hardware issues that I once used with 286's. My 
FC1 on this MB is steady. FC3 crashes in 36-48 hours.

Anyone with more in depth information?

Thanks

Ken