ASUS P4P800 MB FC3 Crashing

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Ken Smith wrote:
> 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

We have around 30 machines in a lab and maybe a server that runs P4P800 
and FC3 and they all work fine. We use the sk98lin module for the 
network card. Only difference with you is that we run vanilla kernels. 
There were issues with the NVIDIA driver but later releases have solved 
these. Maybe you could check your hardware (memtest86, different power 
supply, run it with bare minimum hardware etc)?

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