BIOS updates to a Mach Speed Viper K8M8MS rev 2 motherboard

November 27, 2006 | Categories: Technical, Windows 2 Comments ↓

I have been having odd problems with a Mach Speed Viper K8M8MSr2 motherboard under Linux. All of my other machines, at this point in time, happen to be the same brand, make, and virtually the same model: those are the “r1” or revision 1 boards.

The problem I am seeing under Linux is:

I cannot load Fedora Core x64 4, 5, or 6 directly on the machine.
When I did get something to load, it had to be on a hard drive smaller than 160GB.
Any update to the kernel results in an machine that cannot boot off of the new kernel.

Now, individually, each one of those problems could be related to a distinctly different thing. However, all together, they just seem weird. Additionally, due to a bug in the BIOS version (A02) that is already on the board, I cannot boot the system off of the net (via a PXE boot) while all of my other machines, even client machines, boot off of the network without any issues. It was recommended by the support folks over at MachSpeed.com that I upgrade the BIOS to the A03 version.
So, I took on the task of upgrading the BIOS to the recommended level (A03). This is not easy, since all of the machine I build now-a-days do not have floppy drives in them. Fortunately, being the tech packrat that I am, I have about 15 floppy drives hanging around. But, first, I thought there had to be a better way, like a bootable CDROM.

After a lot of searching and trial-and-error, I came across Bart’s PE Builder which builds a custom bootable CDROM drive for just about any purpose. This worked out very well to create a bootable CDROM, but, unfortunately, it would not allow me to execute the awdflash.exe binary. It kept claiming that it wasn’t a Win32 executable. 🙁

After several attempts at other programs and the final failure with the PE Builder, I broke down and started with the floppy procedure. Now, I would have proceeded faster had I realized that Windows XP includes the option to make an MS-DOS bootable floppy. Since I didn’t know or notice that, I hunted all over until I found BIOSMods.com which provided some good floppy images. Of course, I found that site while looking in to an awdflash.exe problem (read further) after realizing that Windows XP could make the disks, but I thought it was worth noting the since since it has some good links to Dr-DOS.

So, I attached a floppy drive to my desktop system, right-mouse clicked on the A drive and selected “Format..”. Notice the option to “Create an MS-DOS startup disk”. I wish I had seen it earlier. 🙂
Windows Format Option
After clicking start, the drive whirred for a little while (Floppies are so inefficiently slow) and finished up. I opened up the disk to take a look at contents:

Windows Format Option
Things looked good. I copied over the awdflash.exe file I got from the Mach Speed BIOS update procedure and the correct BIOS file. There was literally no room left on the disk which worried me a little, but I thought I would cross (burn?) that bridge when I got there. Thinking I would be smart, I created a BIOS folder and placed the two files in to that folder.

I then hooked a floppy drive up to the Linux machine and booted off the floppy I just created (yes, I tested the boot functionality of the floppy on my machine first) and got to an A:\ prompt. I went in to the BIOS folder (cd BIOS) and executed the awflash.exe application (awdflash.exe K8MR2A03.BIN). awdflash.exe eventually came up and it had the BIOS file name pre-filled in. It was flashing “Please Wait” at the bottom of the screen as it was, I assumed, reading the BIOS off of the floppy. It stayed there forever, with the floppy drive spinning. 🙁

I then tried this same procedure on a test machine I had, and the results were exactly the same. I’m beginning to suspect a problem with the A03 BIOS file. By this time, it was late, and I gave up for the evening.

My Myth (MythTV) scripts

November 15, 2006 | Categories: Linux, Movies, Technical No Comments ↓

Because we have DirecTV with the RCA satellite receiver, there is one key script for managing the most important item with the set top box: changing the channel.

From the site http://www.pdp8.net/directv/directv.shtml, I pulled down the following SetTopBox script script, and it worked beautifully.

However, one thing didn’t work with the standard “./directv.pl setup_channel” command: the on screen display would stay up (yuck). The directv.pl script is supposed to do all of the necessary things when you use the setup_channel option, but it didn’t seem to for me. Since MythTV executes the command with the last argument as the channel number, I threw together a simple wrapper script (Change Channel) for MythTV to use.

Finally, since the directv.pl script works so well, I wrote a quick init script to turn on and off the set top box when the system is turned on or off. It works rather well, and, really, we don’t need the set top box on when the Myth system is off, do we? 🙂

Setting up MythTV: More fun than pulling out your own fingernails (but not by much)

October 20, 2006 | Categories: Linux, Movies No Comments ↓

For over a year now, I’ve been planning to build myself a MythTV box. With the whole DirecTivo thing going on (DirecTv is supposedly planning on dropping the Tivo with their own POS), I figured it was time to get on to something open (like the rest of the systems in my house).

I’ve been watching the whole MythTV arena for a while now.. watching it in the aspect of planning my attack (on getting a system up and running). I decided at the beginning of the week to give it all a try.

I have an AMD64 system (memory, motherboard, case, processor, hard drive, DVDROM drive) sitting idle, so I took it, loaded up FC5_x64 on it, and began following the Fedora Myth(TV)ology How-To page. Everything went rather smoothly, actually, and all was good in the world. Of course, the key component I was missing was a TV-tuner/capture card.

During the MythTV setup, the system would seemingly hang on me. Not all of the time, but most of the time. I would lose all cursor and mouse capabilities, and it just seemed completely locked. A hard reboot of the system brought things back.

On buy.com, I picked up the Hauppauge PVR-150 since that is one of the most popular cards to use under Linux. I bought it on a Monday at around 4pm, and got the thing on Tuesday around 6pm! I popped the card in, and started testing it. It didn’t take me long before the card was working, and, again, all was good.

I started tackling the MythTV setup again, and the lock-ups were more frequent. On a whim, I tried logging in to the system with my laptop, and, to my surprise, I was able to log in. It looked as if X was hung as it was taking up 99% of the cpu. Killing it off brought things back.

There was a brief moment of about 20 minutes where I had everything but the remote working. I uttered a big “woo-hoo!” But, as I continued testing, I started getting more and more lock-ups. I ran another yum update, and, to my surprise, Myth 0.20 had been released. Everything updated happily.

From there on out, it was all down hill. The problems with X locking up persisted, and, after some research, it looks like it is a problem with the linux version of the nvidia display driver and X. Ugh.

So, I decided to reload the machine from scratch. That’s been a nightmare unto itself since the FC5_x64 updates are taking FOREVER to download (the downside of YUM is that it doesn’t pick a mirror local to you.. I was getting mirrors in New Zeland, Japan, Germany.). I abandoned that, and decided to populate my own rsync’ed copy of the updates tree before going back to the install of this machine.

Additionally, I decided to try out the FC5 i386 tree vs the FC5 x64 tree since some of what I have read suggests that there might be problems related to the x64 bit versions of things. Eh.. we’ll see.