[WBEL-users] RE: Corrupted WBEL Format

[Michael Squires]

I just had a similar problem with a Supermicro P4DCE+/dual 1.8GHz Xeon
dual-booting MS Win XP and FreeBSD 5.2-CURRENT.  I rebuilt the kernel to
support 3-D on either an ATI Radeon or MGA card, but after swapping the
video board for the Matrox G450 dual-head card the system became
unstable, the secondary disk became unreliable, and the system would
crash during FreeBSD boot.  MS Windows XP continued to operate OK.  I
eventually replaced the Matrox card with the original ATI Radeon and
recompiled the kernel without support for the Matrox card, and the
system stabilized.

At one point the 40GB secondary was unavailable under Windows and
couldn't be partitioned under FreeBSD, but deleting the partition and
recreating it under Windows eventually caused it to reappear.

The problem in FreeBSD 5.2-CURRENT (the bleeding edge) is apparently due
to contention between the ACPI layer and the DRM layer.

The system arrived with RedHat AS 3 installed (which is very similar to
WhiteBox, of course) and the secondary drive was already munged.  I
can't prove that the drive was ever any good, but so far (2 days)
haven't had problems with it.

This is probably a good reason for going with on-board ATI Rage video,
rather than an AGP card, for servers.

(The SM P4DCE+ seems to be a nice board, although it lacks modern
features like Gigabit Ethernet or SATA support.  So far I've recompiled
the kernel and the OS itself, X.org, and KDE3, all without a problem.)

Mike Squires