NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hi

I just purchased the NASlite+ suite and installed the CDBoot version on a Celeron 400 system I was using to run Win 98SE. Setup when smoothly and the system showed up on my network showing the 6 gig test drive I had installed (this drive had worked flawlessly with Win 98SE on this same mother board) but when accessing the drive either to read or write to it, it would hang the MASlite computer and only a power reset would start it again.

I then installed a different make of drive (6.5 gig) and with this and the other drive still installed I could read and write to the newer drive for a short while before the system would crash requiring a power reset to get back running. I noticed that neither of these drives had been recognized as having the SMART function and the computer would sing every 5 min. telling me this. I decided to install the WD 200 gig drive I had just purchased for this system. NASlite recognized the drive as having some SMART functionality but indicated errors reading any SMART information from the drive and every 5 min. the computer would let me know it was not recognizing the drive as having SMART functions. This drive was a bit more stable and I was able to upload and playback two 700 meg video files but again sooner or later it would crash requiring a power reboot.

Getting tired of this and starting to be a little disillusioned about how "stable" Linux OS was, I moved the drive, NASlite CD, and floppy over to a Celeron 1gig computer that had been running XP and when the computer was rebooted NASlite found the 200 gig drive and also recognized the SMART options and initialized that function (does not sing to me anymore every 5 min.). Although I have had no time to run much testing on the drive, it so far has not crashed (1.5 days).

What this seems to tell me is that some motherboard IDE controllers are not totally compatible with NASlite - has anyone else run into this problem and if so what brand of motherboard or chipset seems to be a problem?

Dan

Jumper settings and cables should always be the first area of scrutiny. Faulty cables or improper hardware configuration causes most problems people encounter when building a NASLite machine.

Hardware incompatibilities are possible, but are rare, especially with common generic hardware, so before trashing the board, make sure all else is properly set.

I suffered the same problem as well as my drive capacity being limited on a PCCHIPS M575 board with an ALi Aladdin IV chipset. I could write to file , but when i tried to read them end up with the message "AIEE. Killing kernel interrupt handler!", Only a hard reset would reboot the machine.
Tony advised me that my IDE controllers may not have been up to scratch, so universal compatability is not assured.
Naslite is a great product , which does the job perfectly its just the machines we try to run it on.

Waiting to get a more recent CPU/Board combo before i continue with my NAS unit.

Another item that is worth checking before dumping those boards are BIOS settings. Specifically, the ISA/PCI PNP settings. Make sure that all hardware such as COM ports, printer ports, etc are disabled, thus not using necessary IRQs. Release all IRQs from manual assignment to ISA, etc.

IRQ conflicts are most often caused by shared IRQs.