On Wed, Aug 14, 2002 at 01:12:43PM +0100, Matt Bernstein scribbled:
> Hi,
> 
> We're very much at a loss as to why the 60 new PCs we've bought largely
> don't run Linux (various 2.4 kernels including 2.4.19, limbo1-BOOT) for
[snip]
> Has anyone else had success or failure stories in particular with this 
> motherboard? We don't really have a significant number of data points just 
> yet, but are willing to try pretty much anything anyone might suggest!
> 
> Matt
> 
> symptoms
> - random data corruption (sometimes memory, more often HDD)
> - somtimes oopsing, but never in the same place
> 
> what we think we've ascertained so far
> - they pass memtest86
> - we've tried different HDDs, no effect
> - tried ide=nodma, possibly makes it crash after longer
> - tried noapic, no effect
> - tried all sorts of BIOS settings, no effect (except--possibly--turning 
> 	off the on board IDE controller and playing nfsroot games)
> - ..and yet they seem to run that other OS fine :-(
> - extra cooling/underclocking doesn't seem to help
> - seems to be fs-independent (tried ext3, reiserfs, jfs)
I've had very similar (actually identical) problems with the ASUS A7V333
mobo. The mobo is completely VIA-based (both north and south) but the
southbridge seems to be much the same. What I did to make the machine run
stable was to - turn the USB2 support off (by hardware, a solder point on
the mobo) and short the solder point which is responsible for the CPU
functional settings data readout (the ROMSIP setting) to read the data from
a BIOS table instead of from the CPU itself. That seemed to have been enough
for me - now the mobo is stable (I'm gonna get rid of it, though...).

Another thing you might check is the CPU voltage - make sure it is the
standard 3.3 and not 3.5 as some manufacturers set it.

hope that helps a bit,

marek