Holy crap. This motherboard is the jackpot of pain in the ass.
Here's a list of problems I encountered. I eventually found (hack-like) solutions to all the ones I've seen so far, but it still took me a full week, and one of my my Linux-savy friends' efforts for most of the day today to get it fully functioning.
- Problem: Inconsistent booting, devices not showing up, freezing on boot (the problems mentioned before).
- Solution: Booting with the "irqpoll" option, which is apparently some option that Linux kernel developers introduced to address a bug that they couldn't fix otherwise. I cropped this up to a problem with my motherboard, since it seemed to be (more directly) related to my hard disk controller.
- Problem: Nivida's proprietary drivers wouldn't function after a reboot. They partially worked (some graphics elements were screwy) before a reboot, but then I'd get some error saying there was an "API mismatch" between the kernel driver and my card.
- Solution: My friend was pretty well versed with the X config file, so he dove right into that. It was something about disabling some of the modules that the nvidia driver spat in there or something. We were going to write it up, but we didn't have a chance because we worked on other problems. It took him about an hour and a half to get both monitors working. However, when we rebooted, we'd still get the weird API error. He said he'd seen that before too and recalled there's some directory containing "volatile" kernel modules. I'm unsure how that works, but we ended up adding a line in rc.local that copied over the kernel module to that directory. It works fine now.
- Problem: After installing grub on the MBR, chain-loading Windows XP would not work. I'd get an error where it whined about ntoskrnl.exe being missing. Sheesh, you'd think it could do without it!
- Solution: We decided to try reinstalling the Windows boot loader onto the MBR, but my XP disk wouldn't boot for some reason (I just got a black screen after it booted into the installer). I decided that the only thing of significance that had changed since I last installed Windows (using exactly the same disk, in fact) was the BIOS. So, we found some utility that allowed you to make a bootable "DOS" CD from Linux with the BIOS flash exe and binary included. I reverted to the version that my motherboard came with, but this didn't work. We tried burning the CD from its ISO (I have a copy on my server), but that didn't work either. I ended up grabbing another version of XP I had handy and it booted fine into that...
In any case, though, this wasn't the problem. It ended up being the farking motherboard again. There's a weird option to give control of the keyboard/mouse either to the BIOS or to the OS. In order to interact with anything at or before the boot loader using a USB device, you have to specify "BIOS." However, I found some post on google saying that this was problematic for this specific situation for some unknown reason. So, I changed XP to the default entry in grub, changed the BIOS setting to "OS" and let it run. It booted fine. I now have a PS/2 keyboard plugged in behind my keyboard so I can change which OS I want when I'm booting.
In summary, don't get this motherboard if you want to install Linux. I've read from countless sources that it's a "Linux Lemon."
