It completed without errors. I'm looking for the CMOS jumper as we speak.

CMOS Jumper did nothing. Arrgh.

Would you care to carry on this conversation off the forum? I'll post my aim id if you want it.

I think it's time for:

http://www.badflash.com/

I'm down but not out. I removed the CMOS battery, set the CMOS Jumper to erase, and pulled the plug and let it sit for a while. I can get a boot screen, but when I try to set bios settings, it hangs and I have to erase all over again. But there is hope. I'm going to try to reflash and hopefully everything will be cool.

Alex

Make sure you boot and flash from a pure dos floppy, you don't want none of those cdrom or mouse dos drivers, just dos, the new bios and the bios flashing utility.

Totally sweet. I'm back in the saddle again. The flash went well and I restore the original bios version. Linux is booting.

Or not...... now it hangs on "Initializing USB controller (usb-ohci)."

Ok.... went up one version from release..... NOW its booting. What should I do from here? Now that we can actually discuss the nForce. lol

Woot!

PS: Note to self: updating bios can be a bad thing. lol

Just go through the same steps again, checking every setting, including the audio controller settings in the bios setup (if there are any).

The only bios setting is to enable or disable AC97: it is enabled.

Dmesg changed slightly from:
usb.c: registered new driver usbdevfs
usb.c: registered new driver hub
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 00:02.0 to 64
usb-ohci.c: USB OHCI at membase 0xf8844000, IRQ 11
usb-ohci.c: usb-00:02.0, nVidia Corporation nForce USB Controller
usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1
hub.c: USB hub found
hub.c: 3 ports detected
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 00:03.0 to 64
usb-ohci.c: USB OHCI at membase 0xf8846000, IRQ 11
usb-ohci.c: usb-00:03.0, nVidia Corporation nForce USB Controller (#2)
usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 2
hub.c: USB hub found
hub.c: 3 ports detected
usbdevfs: remount parameter error
usb.c: registered new driver usblp

To:
usb.c: registered new driver usbdevfs
usb.c: registered new driver hub
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 00:02.0 to 64
usb-ohci.c: USB OHCI at membase 0xf8844000, IRQ 5
usb-ohci.c: usb-00:02.0, nVidia Corporation nForce USB Controller
usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1
hub.c: USB hub found
hub.c: 3 ports detected
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 00:03.0 to 64
usb-ohci.c: USB OHCI at membase 0xf8846000, IRQ 11
usb-ohci.c: usb-00:03.0, nVidia Corporation nForce USB Controller (#2)
usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 2
hub.c: USB hub found
hub.c: 3 ports detected
usbdevfs: remount parameter error
usb.c: registered new driver usblp

This has changed as well:
Installing knfsd (copyright (C) 1996 okir@monad.swb.de).
devfs_mk_dir(snd): using old entry in dir: c259e640 ""
devfs_register(snd/controlC0): could not append to parent, err: -17
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 00:06.0 to 64
intel8x0_measure_ac97_clock: measured 49882 usecs
intel8x0: clocking to 47413

Some things have changed in lsmod and I can't decipher what it means:

Module Size Used by Not tainted
parport_pc 27752 1 (autoclean)
lp 8864 0 (autoclean)
parport 39592 1 (autoclean) [parport_pc lp]
sg 38012 0 (autoclean) (unused)
st 33304 0 (autoclean) (unused)
sr_mod 20888 0 (autoclean) (unused)
sd_mod 14572 0 (autoclean) (unused)
scsi_mod 113344 4 (autoclean) [sg st sr_mod sd_mod]
snd-seq-oss 36480 0 (unused)
snd-seq-midi-event 6592 0 [snd-seq-oss]
snd-seq 51280 2 [snd-seq-oss snd-seq-midi-event]
snd-pcm-oss 46564 0 (unused)
snd-mixer-oss 16792 1 [snd-pcm-oss]
snd-intel8x0 25416 1
snd-ac97-codec 60284 0 [snd-intel8x0]
snd-pcm 92544 0 [snd-pcm-oss snd-intel8x0]
snd-timer 21764 0 [snd-seq snd-pcm]
gameport 3508 0 [snd-intel8x0]
snd-page-alloc 11060 0 [snd-intel8x0 snd-pcm]
snd-mpu401-uart 5696 0 [snd-intel8x0]
snd-rawmidi 20096 0 [snd-mpu401-uart]
snd-seq-device 6464 0 [snd-seq-oss snd-seq snd-rawmidi]
snd 51076 0 [snd-seq-oss snd-seq-midi-event snd-seq snd-pcm-oss snd-mixer-oss snd-intel8x0 snd-ac97-codec snd-pcm snd-timer snd-mpu401-uart snd-rawmidi snd-seq-device]
soundcore 7236 0 [snd]
nfsd 83280 8 (autoclean)
af_packet 16904 1 (autoclean)
w83781d 26164 0 (unused)
eeprom 4852 0 (unused)
lm75 4028 0 (unused)
lm80 6752 0 (unused)
adm1021 7544 0 (unused)
i2c-proc 8692 0 [w83781d eeprom lm75 lm80 adm1021]
i2c-isa 1332 0 (unused)
i2c-core 22052 0 [w83781d eeprom lm75 lm80 adm1021 i2c-proc i2c-isa]
ide-floppy 17408 0 (autoclean)
ide-tape 54768 0 (autoclean)
ide-cd 36516 0 (autoclean)
cdrom 35360 0 (autoclean) [sr_mod ide-cd]
floppy 59548 0
3c59x 31536 1 (autoclean)
supermount 87328 3 (autoclean)
printer 9376 1
usb-ohci 22568 0 (unused)
usbcore 83468 1 [printer usb-ohci]
rtc 10508 0 (autoclean)
ext3 68720 2
jbd 46696 2 [ext3]

lspci -vv:
00:05.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 01b0 (rev c2)
Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 3730
Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B-
Status: Cap+ 66Mhz+ UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR-
Latency: 0 (250ns min, 3000ns max)
Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 5
Region 0: Memory at dc000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=512K]
Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2
Flags: PMEClk- DSI- D1+ D2+ AuxCurrent=0mA PME(D0-,D1-,D2-,D3hot-,D3cold-)
Status: D0 PME-Enable- DSel=0 DScale=0 PME-

00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation nForce Audio (rev c2)
Subsystem: Analog Devices: Unknown device 5361
Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B-
Status: Cap+ 66Mhz+ UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR-
Latency: 0 (500ns min, 1250ns max)
Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 11
Region 0: I/O ports at d800 [size=256]
Region 1: I/O ports at dc00 [size=128]
Region 2: Memory at dc082000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2
Flags: PMEClk- DSI- D1+ D2+ AuxCurrent=0mA PME(D0-,D1-,D2-,D3hot-,D3cold-)
Status: D0 PME-Enable- DSel=0 DScale=0 PME-

Changed all permissions with chmod 777 thinking it might be the lack of write permissions, but still no sound. Dunno what to do. This is frustrating.

Maybe it isn't the appropriate thing to post here, but my nforce 2 audio gave me all kinds of grief. I'm running mandrake 9.1 and the stock OSS driver worked ok, but it wouldn't do more than one thing at a time. I'd fire up XMMS and put on some tunes and then try to play UT2003 and I would either have music, or game sound... In mandrake config if I went to the sound config button it crashed solid. I tried different OSS drivers, then ALSA drivers, then different settings and such, but it was all just attempts to follow other people's solutions because I am pretty newb to linux. Finally I gave up, disabled the Nforce2 sound, and got a good old soundblaster live... went right in, works like a charm, and sounds better anyway. It cost me 5 bucks on ebay! I have to wonder if the problem actually is something wrong with Nvidia's drivers because as soon as I installed them I'd start getting insmod errors during boot... Like I said, I am a newb, so there are many possibilities as to what was wrong, but I sure got tired of banging my head on the wall over it.

just my two cents... if only I would have known I could save all those hours of hair pulling for 5 bucks! lol

Other than all that, Linux has been treating me great... excepting for the fact that now windows xp (which I previously thought was great after win98!) seems slow and glitchy by comparison! I've tried UT2003, AAO, and NWN on the same hardware under Windows and Linux, and those games that are cross platform I now run under Linux, it looks better, runs smoother, and never crashes!

MSI K7N Delta-L
Athlon xp 2800+
2 x 256MB Corsair 2700 CAS2LL DDR
Asus 128MB Geforce 4 Ti4200
WD 80Gig HD
Soundblaster Live 5.1

Yeah, I have thought about that, and this is a "$20" solution. I just wish I didn't have to spend any money. But your point is well taken and I am considering it as we speak. I'm just disappointed that I wasn't able to get everything up and running. I guess somethings are harder to acheive than others. Oh well. Thanx for the suggestion. If no compelling suggestions come up soon, I'm going to have to do that.

Alex

So do you get unreal to work with digital out then using your SB card ??

I don't mean to sound rude, but this thread isn't about SB or getting Unreal to work. If you wouldn't mind starting another thread for that question, I'd appreciate it. Thank you.