We support Linux? Maybe…

I upgraded some RAM today, and my clunk-a-riffic Gigabyte Motherboard (GA-P35-DS4) didn’t do so well handling it. I have come to realize this is not a very good motherboard.

Reboot loop resolved (I hope)

One thing leads to another…

There are a hand-full of issues – most minor – I have been working my way through. A big one, though, was the reboot loop I mentioned in a couple of posts.

Gigabyte Bios and the clock?

What time is it!?

I’m not sure of the problem, but I recently noticed my clock is running slow. I mean like I would sync the time and then 10 minutes later it would be like a minute slow again. I first noticed it when I was supposed to call into a conference call, and thought I still had and hour and 3 minutes to make the call, when my boss called to make sure I hadn’t forgot – I was already 5 minutes late! That’s roughly and hour-and-a-half slow and not something I would care to repeat – embarrassing!

Now, as this is a brand-new Gigabyte P35-DS4 motherboard, I really hope it is something in the software chain somewhere, and not something that will require replacing the mobo! Although I’m sure it’s possible I simply got a bad apple.

I’ve tried the most obvious things, like making sure I have ntpd running, and that Ubuntu is set to automatically sync with some time servers and so forth. No luck on that front so far, although I did set up a daily cron job for ntpdate, because I saw a few people talking about that as well.

B-I-O-S

So, I got it in my head that maybe – just maybe – a BIOS update would help. It’s something worth doing anyway, as there was a newer version out and I’d like to see how the process would go anyway. I downloaded the file, but it was in Windows .exe format. I suppose I could have used Wine to open it, but a brief search turned up the fact that it was simple a .rar self-extracted archive, so Archive Manager had no problems there.

The second issue is that this box doesn’t have a floppy drive and all the instructions talk about using a floppy. As it turns out, a USB stick will work, but they really should mention that; I would guess the majority of people do not flash BIOS as a regular activity, and that a growing number of computers do not have floppy drives.

In any case, Gigabyte has a nifty feature called Q-Flash on many of its mobos, so at power-up all I had to do was hit “END” and the utility to flash the BIOS is right there. Simple enough, took about 2 minutes.

Minor catch

You have to be sure to set everything to the “optimized defaults” on re-boot. That was in the instructions, and I was going through each “sub-section” of the setting and hitting “F7″ to do that. I thought I hit all the sections, but what would happen is that I would boot up until the Linux kernel started loading, and then the machine would re-boot.

This is pretty scary, but when I went back into the BIOS settings, I saw a set to optimized defaults on the first screen. I used that, and then everything booted up straight away.

Did it work?

As for the clock problem – it’s a bit early to call yet. I just went through this process about 10 minutes ago. I can say the clock looks right, if it is still running slow, it is not nearly as off as it was before.

And, of course, if it is fixed I can’t swear if it was flashing the BIOS or diddling with ntp/ntpdate (which I have done a lot off) that did it. I run into this a lot, because even though I know I should only be changing one thing at a time, I find it hard to do so in practice.