A Penguin in Purple Clothing

Wednesday September 08, 2004

Opteron Systems

So, I got my dual Opteron PCI Express system back up again. When I first got the board, Q and I stuck in into a temorary case. Now that we got the permanent cases in, Q transfered the board. Alas, a few issues arrose. For one, the video card was removed for another system, so I had to move that back (it is a Nvidia PCI Express Geforce 5300). But, I wasn't getting any display working. Turns out it was because it was going through a bad Belkin KVM. Once I hooked up the video card directly to the monitor, it worked fine. Although it wasn't finding the hard drive. I realized that when Q hooked up the CD ROM, he put that on the primary bus and the hard drive on the secondary bus. I thought maybe that was causing the issue, so I reversed them. Still, it didn't find the drive. I poked in the BIOS for a bit trying to figure out what the problem was. I had to upgrade the BIOS on the board anyways for it to recognize the dual GigE ports, so I did that (which was fun trying to find a DOS boot disk to do it from!).

I finally did get the hard disk to work, and it turns out it was a jumper on the disk -- it was set to "Master with slave present" and did not have a slave device on the bus. So, I removed the jumper and vwalla, it booted again. I am running Fedora Core 2 x86_64 with the latest kernel (so that it will use the forcedeth driver for the nforce gige ports).

So, tomorrow I should be getting in the PCI Express Infiniband card to play with. That should be interesting.

(2004-09-08 17:19:38.0) Permalink Comments [4]