I tried installing after flashing the new BIOS but I haven't had any luck... still getting a BSOD that complains that it's not ACPI compliant I've tried fiddling with the BIOS settings but can't get around the problem :< Any thoughts?
Can you post the exact error? That might point to the problematic ACPI object. Ex: I know I was getting STOP 0x000000A5 (0x00000002, 0x81301C00, 0x00000001, 0x81289858) when I was trying to use Microsoft's ASL compiler when rebuilding my BIOS. I used Intel's ASL compiler and everything just worked fine.
I'm getting STOP 0x000000A5 (0x0000000000000017, 0x0000000000000026, 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000)
Alright, well I installed the relevant drivers and monitored frequency and voltage with CPU-Z while I ran stress tests on the CPU. It didn't seem to be scaling them.
So can we just lose the PowerNow tables and try it without? None of the power optimization stuff is a big interest to me, I'm only running two of these at once so it's not a huge issue. Just need to get 2k8 running.
That works! Thank you. I just bought one of these Rackable Systems on E-Bay and have been battling this all day. What a great find. Their website had no mention of this. By the way I made a Win 98 bootable flash drive and extracted the contents of that .zip file to it. Run the .bat file to update the BIOS and your good to go. Thanks again.
YES! Thank you so so so much! It works perfectly. Edit: The systems were supplied by itrecylenow on ebay.
Very cool. If you want me to mod it for the latest Silicon Image firmware and/or PowerNow support, please let me know. FWIW, I no longer use the DSDT after the BIOS has POST'ed since this was making my mods RAM-amount-specific. It's necessary for using Windows built-in capability to override the DSDT or SSDT tables. I can just use the original DSDT AML file (which dynamically gets the RAM amount) and decompile it with Intel's ASL compiler.
Glad to be of help... pure luck, just came across it by accident. Could I just clarify:? This BIOS 2.18b allows the installation of Server 2008 (and Vista/Win 7 as well?)? Does this give full support for Dual Core Opterons with these Operating systems installed? Or does it still need the PowerNow support to be added to the BIOS? If so then yes, tqhoang, please if you would be so kind as to add the latest SI firmware and PowerNow then that would be great. Hopefully I should hear back from either of the suppliers on eBay as to whether they're selling Rev.G boards and then I can get it ordered next week. Then save pennies for a while and get a couple of Dual Cores and we should be away Many thanks for all your efforts - greatly appreciated.
Check out bootdisk.com for their "driver-free" DOS floppy image. From the BIOS218B.zip file, put the following 3 files onto the DOS the floppy boot disk (218B.RF4, phlash16.exe, update.bat). Boot to pure DOS with the "driver-free" boot floppy. Run update.bat. Reboot and go into BIOS and update anything you need.