Asus Bios bug

[nforceuser]

I posted a while back about 2 A7N266-C (nforce 415D chipset) systems. One works perfectly with Redhat 7.3 (bios 1.001E) and the other with 1.03 hangs when you try to "startx". That post was called "Problems with A7N266-C" or something similar.

I finally got the guts to do a complete reinstall, but flashed to 1.001E. The system worked perfectly. Flash back to 1.03 (or 1.04) and startx locks the system. (Note, the nVidia drivers weren't even installed, they are not the issue here.) It appears all the Asus A7N266-C bios revisions that are newer than 1.001E break something and cause Redhat lockups. It appears to be APM related as far as I can tell. After a lot of work, a friend of mine was able to get Redhat to work under 1.04 by doing a LOT of hacking with the kernal to remove all APM support.

I'm sure this same problem affects A7N266-E and A7N266-VM users. Asus' bios is to blame. Something changed between the 1.001E and 1.03 versions related to APM causes lockups.

I'm considering writing Asus to see if they know about this issue.

[nforceuser]

The newer bios revisions also cause that strange Grub error #28 "Selected item does not fit into memory". This seems to be an issue with LBA48 addressing.

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by nforceuser
I'm considering writing Asus to see if they know about this issue. Do it! I'd be interested in the solution, anyway (even though I don't have one of those boards). Or check the changelogs on the BIOS to see what's different between the version that works and the first version that doesn't (because they've likely not changed anything else that also breaks it, and most changelogs only show what changed in the last release).

[tanksimpson]

I am also getting the GRUB "Error 28" with Red Hat 8.0, although I have an MSI nForce board. The bios is fairly recent, I flashed it about a month ago. How do you solve this problem?

UPDATE: I reinstalled and have the same problem. This time I made a boot floppy, and fortunately that works for booting. But booting off the floppy sucks!. I did a little googling on this issue and found a post where a Caldera tech tells a beta tester (who has an Asus nForce board) that GRUB is the problem. Caldera released a new GRUB that fixes the problem - hopefully Red Hat will, too. BTW, I am using BIOS version 2.6 on my MSI K7N420 Pro.