The mobo died in my file server, so I decided to upgrade and actually get a modern motherboard for it, with actual hardware RAID, etc. I bought an ASUS M2A-VM HDMI (I didn’t really need the video features, but the price was good).

When I try booting it into Fedora Core 6, the hard drive hangs. Fine, no surprise. It doesn’t recognize the hardware (I was going from a Sempron to an Athlon-64 X-2).

The problem is, I can’t boot from an installation disk or a rescue disk, either. It gets to the point at which it says:

running sbin/loader

…and then, nothing. Just a flashing cursor. I’ve let it go for half an hour, with no joy. Is it possible that the motherboard is of such a recent vintage that Anaconda doesn’t know how to deal with it? I’ve never before had a machine that I couldn’t boot into Linux from a CD.

[Update after doing a search for “Linux M2A-VM boot problems”]

Apparently I had to disable HPET. It seems to be working now.

[Late night update]

Uh, oh.

“Cannot find any Linux partitions on your drive.”

Well, that’s why I’m going to RAID 1…

[Wednesday evening update]

Even though I found the old installation on the IDE drive, because X is broken, I decided to try to do an installation on the new dual 250-meg SATAs. Unfortunately, neither the original installation or the install CDs can find the LAN connector. I look at the BIOS, and it says it’s enabled. Any ideas?

I can install without it, but the machine won’t be of much value if the OS can’t talk to the rest of the local network, let alone the Internet.