On Sunday 25 May 2008 17:02:07 Mike Doty wrote: > Peter Humphrey wrote: > | I was poking around in my BIOS this morning and rediscovered a setting > | to define the installed OS. I'd wondered about it some time ago and > | then forgotten about it. > | > | I can set the BIOS setting "OS Installation" to "Other" or to "64bit > Linux > | 2.6.9". I have it set to Other at the moment. My questions are: what > effect > | this setting is likely to have, and whether it's really specific to the > | version. > | > | This is a Supermicro H8DCE motherboard with dual Opteron 246s and 4GB > RAM in > | four banks, two connected to each CPU. > | > | I've tried Google but found nothing. > > Supermicro would be able to tell you. It most likely affects boot order > and/or ACPI tables/features.
Well, I tried it to see. At the next boot, one of the two drives in software RAID-1 had two faulty partitions, and the whole physical disk seemed to be the cause of numerous long timeouts and resulting failure messages during boot. So I've put it back :-) The problem could equally have been due to a dodgy disk, or even the SATA interface on the motherboard. I'll have to keep an eye on it. Sometimes an experiment results in a lot of work - in this case, multi-GB of backup and restore, and I've still to found out why the rescue system, which is on an ordinary IDE disk, won't boot. Too many coincidences for my liking. -- Rgds Peter -- gentoo-amd64@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
