Motherboard stupidity of the day

[Daniel Feenberg]

On Sat, 15 Sep 2007, David Kramer wrote:

> So I'm shopping for a motherboard, now that I picked the processor. Gotta 
> support Core 2 Duo, 1333Mhz fsb, at least one real COM port, NO onboard 
> video, and somewhat sane layout.
>
> So I find this board that looks great.  It's the Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3. 
> Googling for reviews, I find
> http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/406
> which contains:
>
> "It is very important to notice that the single ATA/133 port available on 
> this motherboard is controlled by the JMicron chip, not by the chipset. This 
> means that if you still have a parallel IDE optical drive it will only be 
> recognized on Windows after you install the “Gigabyte SATA2” driver. The 
> problem is that this driver comes on the motherboard CD-ROM, and you won’t be 
> able to install it, as the system does not recognize your optical drive. You 
> can download the driver from the net, however the driver for the on-board LAN 
> port is also on the CD-ROM… The only option you have is to copy the JMicron 
> driver from the CD to a floppy disk or a USB pen drive using another PC. This 
> problem happens not only with this motherboard from Gigabyte, but also with 
> all other motherboards based on Intel P965 chipset we’ve seen to date. Of 
> course if you have a SATA optical drive you won't face this issue."
>
> My research so far is inconclusive whether this mobo will have problems with 
> a recent distro (part because so many of the reported problems are from 
> overclockers, and partly because it seems like there's been quite a few 
> versions of this board), but.....
>
> How do you make a motherboard that Windows can't access IDE devices 
> with???!!!?!
>
> (posted for humor value.  The above is a rhetorical question)
>

This isn't that uncommon a situation for OEM motherboards. The engineer 
designing the board can generally count on the downstream vendor to add 
the windows driver when the full computer is manufactured. He wouldn't 
care that a standard windows retail copy wouldn't install, since the 
windows customer is unlikely to notice that. This is the situation the 
windows "recovery disk" was intended to cover. It is more unusual for a 
motherboard sold in a retail box, and is probably a mistake on Gigabyte's 
part, since it will likely annoy retailers who will get complaints and 
returns.

For the Linux user in this situation, the possibilities for getting the 
drivers installed are many - USB thumb drives, USB ethernet (works well 
for us during setup), PCI ethernet, etc. Anyting that can establish 
contact with the outside world can be used, and there has always been 
something that could be installed temporarily for this purpose.

Daniel Feenberg


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