I took a half day to see if I could replace core 1 with core 2 on this box (dual xeon 2.8GHz, Intel server MB SE7505VB2, 2Gb ram, usb logitech optical wheelmouse and PS/2 keyboard, ATI Radeon 9200 with LG 1751S LCD monitor, Intel SCSI RAID controller with dual RAID 1 mirrored 36Gb drives, plus a 76Gb SATA drive.) Core 1 had been running fairly well, except for constant hiccups (slight stalls) in keeping up with the mouse when dragging windows and moving around the gnome desktop. Over 5 hours I reloaded the OS 3 times, did 2 CD media checks (md5sums are all okay). The monitor, video card and mouse get probed and identified properly during installation. Grub was loaded onto the SATA drive, and the root partition was on the SCSI drive. In the end, it never booted, and I am back using Core 1. There was some 'method to it's madness', which I found interesting. First boot after installation it wouldn't run GRUB, and said 'No Operating system found'. Second boot it would show Grub and I would select the smp kernel. It would get through the 'uncompressing the kernel.. OK booting the kernel' Then I would see; "ACPI: S3 and PAE don't like each other for now, S3 disabled" "audit (1085574744.379:0) initialized" booting Redhat nash ver 3.5.22..." Here it would do one of two things. 1. It would run Kudzu, at which point when Kudzu asks to press any key, it appears that the keyboard is not recognized, and in fact keyboard keys move the mouse cursor! 2. It would get to the welcome screen, at which point the mouse doesn't work. (Once it went through to the Fedora login screen, but wouldn't accept keyboard input). ----- I tried also be putting the mouse onto the other PS2 port. No difference in behaviour. --- In the end, it would get to the point of starting up the system, but would hang just after it writes the line: "Enabling swap space OK" ... Pressing a keyboard key here would yield: " psmouse.c Mouse at isa0060/serio0/input0 lost synchronization, throwing 2 bytes away" ------- Going through the BIOS settings for this board, I couldn't find anything out of whack - USB 1.1 and 2 were enabled. One final note: It kept complaining the device 'hdg was not responding'. This is shown as a PIO device, but I'm not sure what it is. Even core 1 boot complains about it, but otherwise, core 1 is working just fine. ------ Well, this is my blog of Wedn, May 26, 2004 and my first experience with Core 2. Hopefully it is helpful to someone in the future. Henry
