On Mon, 09 Feb 2004 19:51:46 +0000, cleurs wrote:

It concerns a 80GB Maxtor HDD. It works perfectly fine in my old PC. There I
can use the exact similar setup, except for the mobo/mem/cpu, without any
troubles. That's why I'm thinking of linux / nForce2 being a bad combo.

Sorry, I thought my post was pretty extensive. Thanks for your reaction. To be
more specific, when I boot from the mandrake iso-CD, I have to decide where
to install linux. Either automatically or manually, as soon as my partitions are
checked and formatted, the system lock up and a hardware reboot is needed.
So without my old PC linux is not even getting installed.

I posted a link very recently regarding getting the ASUS A7N8X-X
motherboard working with Linux. I had the same problem of perpetual
lockups at first. I eventually got it working so there are no lockups
and it is even more stable than my last system. Getting the two to
work together seems to be problematic for many users. I think it has
something to do with the nVidia chipset and the Mandrake kernel... and
the way the chipset handles IDE - you may have noticed that lockup
often occurs during heavy disk read/writes.

Anyway, I dedicated a website to this problem he

http://piff.freshpull.com/asus_linux.html

I personally solved the problem by disabling DMA HD access - I've
had no lockups since then. This is a rather drastic measure,
though, and you might have success by following some of the other
suggestions listed on the website.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions, email me at
the address provided.

Good luck.