Unfortunately I didn't have much chance to work on this over the
weekend, but it was so encouraging to hear from all of you. Thanks
Chris, Andy, Stan, Jim and Willem for your suggestions.
I managed to update the BIOS (which was several revs old - ver 0502 to
ver 1001), and that seemed to be enough to get me past the sticking point:
running /sbin/loader
and the installation is proceeding. How lovely it feels to be asked what
language I speak!
I have some questions about some bios settings:
1) CPU Frequency
The default value is 200MHz, and the max is 400MHz. The BIOS utility
allows any integral value between those points [200, 201, ... 400]. If I
set to 400MHz, is that what is referred to as overclocking?
Are there risks associated with this?
2) Onboard SATA Type
Default value is 'IDE Controller', other options are 'AHCI Controller'
and 'RAID Controller'. I know I don't want RAID (at least not at this
time). Wikipedia says that all but the newest operating systems can have
some trouble with AHCI. Since I want to run VMWare (or something
similar) on this box to work on various platforms (XP, vista, linux, 32
and 64-bit versions where possible), I wonder if I should just stick
with the IDE setting?
Or maybe I should try AHCI, and revert to IDE later if I run into trouble?
Thanks,
Dave
