[OpenIndiana-discuss] Intel D510MO - do not flash the bios to 5XX GRUB will freeze

[Ray Arachelian]

So, I wasn't sure for a few days why OI wouldn't boot, and I thought
perhaps something corrupted grub, or I would have posted this earlier.

I tried all the solaris distros including oi151, oi148, sol 11 express,
sol 10, Schillix, Belenix, Milax, even the old osol134.  No luck.  They
all hang in grub with "Loading Stage 2....."
Tried to boot off USB thumb drives too, same thing on the internal SATA
hard drives as well.

If you have this motherboard do not upgrade the BIOS to 5xx.  I'm not
sure exactly what version broke it.  I'm only able to downgrade it to
501 from 516.

I tried to use the ISO image as pressing F7 fails to go back a major
version to 400 or 3xx, and this too fails to boot - dies with an opcode
violation before FreeDOS finishes booting.  This is off a USB DVD-RW
drive, so maybe I'll take out one of the internal drives and hook up the
DVD-RW that way and try again, or maybe I'll be able to boot off
whatever the latest FreeDOS image is and try to downgrade the BIOS that
way...

I've not tried to mess with the BSDs, nor tried to compile ZFS for linux
and make a live CD out of that.  I probably won't as I'd rather have a
solaris derivate.


On the upside, patching did fix one of my D510MO machines that couldn't
boot newer versions Linux, since I wanted to upgrade mythbuntu on it,
but unfortunately, all I can boot is Linux on both ATOM machines now.

Any thoughts on what the difference between the versions of grub used by
solaris derrivates and linux might be (beyond ZFS)?


newegg had a nice combo deal for $230 today for a core 2/mobo/4G
ram/hd/case, so that's on the way, and it's got 2 PCI + 1 PCIe.  From
what I see the onboard ethernet will likely not work, but this one has 4
onboard SATA slots, and two PCI slots, plus a PCIe slot, so there's
plenty of room to grow.  Someone reported the board will actually accept
8GB of RAM, so I might try that later on as well and see if it works. 
It's not a high end box, but it'll do for a NAS. 


I'll see if I can find a nice quad gigabit intel card to put in there
and speed up access a bit.  How's multipathing in OI?


The Atom board was very nice in terms of power consumption.  The new box
has a 480W PS, it'll probably use less than that, but, would have been
nice to save some watts.
I wish someone would make ATOM boards for use as NAS servers.  Something
with 16 SATA plugs and quad gigabit ethernet and lots of RAM would have
been really nice.