Asrock 939Dual-SATA2 Motherboard Strangeness

[Robert L Cochran]

This is a followup to my earlier emails in which I've expressed interest 
in AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual core processors and appropriate motherboards 
for same. I'm the pleased owner of an X2 4400 now, it is installed on an 
Asrock 939Dual-SATA2 motherboard. I'm puzzled about 2 issues with this 
motherboard.

#1 -- I also installed a Plextor PX-716SA DVD-RW drive. This is an SATA 
drive and I can't boot off it with a bootable DVD. The drive is 
installed on the motherboard's SATA2 connector (this is a plain SATA 
connector, item #13 on page 2 of the manual. It is not item #10, "Serial 
SATAII connector", the red one.) 

There is also a PATA Sony DVD-RW drive plugged into the secondary IDE 
connector, motherboard item #16. I can boot from this, fortunately.

Each time I press the power button, I get a BIOS POST message telling me 
to reboot and select a new boot drive or press a key to continue. 
Pressing any one key causes the message to repeat. Rebooting with 
CTRL-ALT-DEL will then bring up the Grub splash screen, and the system 
boots.

Any comments about this?

#2 -- I'm interpreting the PLED pins of the System Panel Header (item 
#17 on page 2 of the manual) to mean Power LED. On my Lian Li case, the 
Power LED wires are 2 wires in a 3-pin connector. The middle connector 
pin is empty. Yet, the PLED pins on the motherboard header are for a 
2-pin connector.

But wait! Just to the left of it is the Chassis Speaker Header, item 
#18, and if you look closely, there is text saying something like 
"PWRLED" or some such and there are 3 wave-soldered holes on the 
motherboard right next to the Chassis Speaker Header.

I'm confused about where to plug in the Power LED connector. Any comments?

One final note. If you get this motherboard for yourself and install 
Fedora Core 4 on it, be sure to have the latest glibc and kernel-smp 
rpm's and install them right after the Fedora install, so that you will 
have networking available from the onboard NIC.

The system seems very nice -- I'm using it now, restoring backed up data 
to the new drive. The 4400 processor seems nice and speedy.

Thanks

Bob Cochran
Greenbelt, Maryland, USA