FYI - I added a few v1.23 BIOS'es to the first post. Please provide feedback...I'm curious if the PowerNow option is only the old PSB entries or if Arima finally added dynamic generation of the ACPI DSDT PSS objects.
TQ & all who helped I have to say many thanks for your help guys !! I have been absent from posting for a while due to my server falling off the desk as mentioned in previous posts. I have now had a chance to test the server and have to say the only real damage was the bmc card ethernet port which I have managed to repair. After power on I noticed my sbs 2008 was no longer activated, it was on original install ( Slic modded bios + cert + OEM key from the sticky ), so I decided to reinstall sbs, which installed ok but was not activated. Assuming I had damaged the slic mod in the bios through bios changes, I re flshed with the original 218 bios and re installed but still the same. The dvd is modified as other forum threads to autoactivate, which I swear it had in the past, however it will not now ? Having realised re installing had no affect on the activation, which left me with 2 days to activate on the original drive, at least I would have 60 days on the new install to test the server again. I managed to re activate the new install by slmgr -ilc to install the dell cert. Since my original build was a raid 1 setup having 2 disks, and 1 of those disks is now a virgin install, all my data and previous build was still on the other disk of the previous raid set. Eventually I then connected the other raid disk as a STAND ALONE sata drive and restarted, back to 1 day left for activation, I then slmgr -ilc the del cert in and activated that install. Now with a complete system working server again I plan to rebuild the raid array and continue to debug the freezing issues. However being busy in work I havnt had time to play further with the server not got to the point of rebuilding the raid array, or upgrading the bios from 218. Because of this delay I am supprised to see the server hasn't frozen, it has been running for 2 weeks now. Therfore it looks like my issue was caused by the raid setup at this time running with 3 drives all connected as sata drives with NO raid array, all is well. Even with the original 218 bios. Ok I have no powernow etc in the bios. So my next step will be update the bios for powernow and all should still be ok. After further testing and time I will rebuild the raid array and see if that causes it to freeze again, just to prove it in my case. That said I still can't believe the raid was the true cause because I am sure I had tried it with a sata drive in the past in fact I had tried ubuntu installs without raid. Of course the only other change has been the server falling of the desk, BUT I DONT suggest others having the freezing issue drop their servers. lol.. LJ
LJ - If you don't need RAID, I have posted non-RAID versions (i.e. SATA-Link) of most of the HDAMA-G BIOS'es in the first post.
Thanks TQ will take a look, would like powernow must admit. I would prefer raid but if that was the true cause of my issues then I would rather have a working server than raid setup. I don't really need failover protection, can always image backup the drive. LJ
TQH & LJ: Hey, I have been absent for a while since I had a lot of College work to do. Unfortunately since flashing the PowerNow enabled BIOS I am still getting freezes, they are very random though. The last freeze I had was today for completely no reason. Everything was running fine, I left my PC asleep and went out, when I came back after an hour the server was frozen. The freeze before that was not more than a week ago I think. I am going to start noting freezes in Excel to find out if the meantime is linked somehow (should have done it before!) LJ: Great your server is up and running. Would you be able to give me the link for the BIOS you are running successfully. I may have to get rid of powernow and start using the old BIOS. Merry Christmas . Mateusz.
Mateusz, LJ and all - Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Hopefully we can figure out why the Opteron250 is not behaving with PowerNow in 2011.
Hello everyone. I'm wondering if someone could give me some advice. I have a HDAMA-I Board which I have flashed with the 1.23 BIOS to allow me to install Windows 7. Thanks to the New BIOS I can now get the install to run. My problem is I can't get the win & installer to find any of the attached HDD's There is a PCI RAID card attached to the board. It is an AMCC 9550SX-4/8LP SI I can't seem to find proper drivers for the card anywhere.... Is there something I am missing?
TQH: Thanks. LJ - TQG: Happy new year! LJ: When was the last time you had a freeze? Parum: I dont have that board so I can't help you. Sorry... Just googled it and found out that ages ago I was about to buy a similar one from the same vendor. And I had one today again. Been on for nearly 10 days. Only 10! I now changed the poweroption in control panel to high performance to see whether it changes anything.
Its always fun when 3Ware gets purchased by AMCC who then sells the 3Ware section of their company to LSI... Who do not list this specific card on their site. I tried their driver for the 9000 Series... No such luck... Why are things Never easy. lol
Unfortunately the lockups are going to continue to happen...there's either something not right with the HDAMA-G BIOS, the Opteron E4 CPU's, or the AMD datasheet and/or Linux PowerNow VID's are wrong. FWIW, the Opteron 280 E6 settings in the AMD datasheet caused lockups on my HDAMB board...then I tried the Linux PowerNow settings (the voltage was a little different for one of the frequencies) and all was good. If anyone with an HDAMA-I and the new v1.23 BIOS has the Opteron 250 E4's, perhaps they could post their ACPI DSDT table? An RW-Everything report for it would probably be sufficient.
I'm Going to take another shot at it today. It may be that the RAID setup isn't correct. Hopefully its that simple, and not that the RAID card is shot...
Just wanted to shoot a quick update and say that I just hit 30days uptime today on my server. Powernow still working no lockups or freezes. Again I am running two 285's on a rev-e motherboard with 6gb micron ecc ram and no sata ports.
9550 compatibility I was able to run many flavors of linux (Centos, Fedora, PclinuxOS )on this board. Currently running Fedora as a file server for windows network. I am really happy with it as I get around 110MB/s writes on large files (DVD iso's). I use the 9950 to boot from
Finally got around to testing these.. had some trouble getting a bootdisc sorted! Anyway, been testing with Win7, both will boot, I've done more testing with SATA raid so far, RAID bios looks good.. RAID5 plus a few other options appeared now Powernow is working as identified by CPU-Z, had one freeze today although I was playing around with drivers so may be unrelated, will keep you posted as I go Many thanks again
Ok, I just received my server today, 8gb ram, two Opteron 290's (dual core) and a sata 500gb hard drive. I think I have the Rev.G board but the thing I am stuck on is how do I flash the bios. I do not have a floppy drive or even a usb floppy drive just cd's, dvd's and usb pens. I am looking to run either SBS2011 or Server2008r2. Any help would be greatly appreciated, Regards Josh (Aged 15).
@joshthewacko - Hey, I'm aged 16 (was 15 when bought it) Goog luck with this server, it can be really annoying. To flash bios use a memorystick, easybcd and bootable iso image. @tqhoang - Unfortunately the 'unfortunate device' froze today and the worst thing is that it has been running for less than 12 hours... Restarted it yesterday. I will go back to the non-dsdt bios (the one I have been running before) to see if it fixes it. I don't mind restarting it all the time but I'm afraid that my Exchange 2010 database gets corrupted.