hi gang, just wanted to post this up for the next debianista to find when they use this motherboard. Picked up a Tyan S2099GNNR from newegg on an openbox special -- cheap! its based on Intel Trinity i845E chipset.
okay. This motherboard does not play nice with GrUB when there is a usb drive plugged into the back of the thing. If you get a freeze at GRUB stage2 in the boot process, it is the usb drive interfering. pull the thing out and leave it unplugged until grub comes online to the menu or command line. Then you're good. note that this is obviously a problem in a power fail restart situation. I figured this out in the *very* brief flash of the drive states before the BIOS throws up the ESCD info and flushes it off the screen and starts trying to boot a drive. Without the usb drive plugged in, the onboard ide drives show up with a SMART enabled/disabled message. with the usb drive plugged in, the usb drive shows up FIRST in that list. I think the BIOS is reporting that usb drive as hd0 but still boots off IDE0 disk 0. So grub comes up off the MBR and starts looking for stage2 on the what the BIOS reports as HD0 but its not there. anyway. if you find this problem, there's the solution -- pull the usb drive during boot. enjoy A
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