Jesper....I've had good use out of a Supermicro P6SBS MB that
uses the 440BX chipset and the Adaptec AIC-7895 Dual Channel
SCSI controller. It utilizes no onboard graphics controller
(which I purposely avoid). Supermicro has a dual processor
version of this MB, the P6DBS. If you find you need to change
MB's, this might be the one for you. I've not had any of the
problems that you describe.
Alan
Jesper Andersson wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> I recently tried to install Mandrake 7.0 Linux on a system based on an
> Intel L440GX+ server board with dual pentium processors, an Adaptec
> AIC-7896 SCSI controller and a Cirrus Logic GD5480 on-board graphics
> controller (which should all be supported).
>
> When installing Linux the installation takes several hours (>8h), rather
> than the expected minutes and when installation is complete disc access
> is very erratic to say the least. Attempting to copy a handful of files
> from one place to another yields hundreds of error messages (SCSI time
> out) and the copying takes ridicously long time (hundreds of times
> slower than expected). Once copied the files seem OK though.
>
> I suspected a hardware problem and did a low level format of the disc
> and attempted to install Windows98. This installation went without
> problems in the expected time (a couple of tens of minutes) and there
> were no disc access problems once installed.
>
> I then went back and tried to install Mandrake again, with the same
> results.
>
> Hence, it seems that the device driver for the Adaptec AIC-7896 is
> buggy/not compatible with the SCSI bios I have.
>
> Has anyone reported similar problems, and more importantly, is there a
> fix for it.
>
> Best regards
> Jesper Andersson
