Re: [gentoo-amd64] OS setting in BIOS

[Peter Humphrey <peter@humphrey.ukfsn.org>]

On Sunday 25 May 2008 17:02:07 Mike Doty wrote:
> Peter Humphrey wrote:
> | I was poking around in my BIOS this morning and rediscovered a setting
> | to define the installed OS. I'd wondered about it some time ago and
> | then forgotten about it.
> |
> | I can set the BIOS setting "OS Installation" to "Other" or to "64bit
> Linux
> | 2.6.9". I have it set to Other at the moment. My questions are: what
> effect
> | this setting is likely to have, and whether it's really specific to the
> | version.
> |
> | This is a Supermicro H8DCE motherboard with dual Opteron 246s and 4GB
> RAM in
> | four banks, two connected to each CPU.
> |
> | I've tried Google but found nothing.
>
> Supermicro would be able to tell you.  It most likely affects boot order
> and/or ACPI tables/features.

Well, I tried it to see. At the next boot, one of the two drives in software 
RAID-1 had two faulty partitions, and the whole physical disk seemed to be 
the cause of numerous long timeouts and resulting failure messages during 
boot. So I've put it back :-)

The problem could equally have been due to a dodgy disk, or even the SATA 
interface on the motherboard. I'll have to keep an eye on it.

Sometimes an experiment results in a lot of work - in this case, multi-GB of 
backup and restore, and I've still to found out why the rescue system, 
which is on an ordinary IDE disk, won't boot. Too many coincidences for my 
liking.

-- 
Rgds
Peter
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