Clone install headaches

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2004 at 09:15:22AM -0500, Paul DiRezze wrote:
> SUCCESS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
> 
> At 10:36 AM 11/03/2004 -0500, you wrote:
> >Either your PCI BIOS or sis900 module is broken. First check on your BIOS 
> >setup, somewhere in the "Advanced Configuration" and look for the option 
> >"PNP OS" or "Plug-and-Play OS Installed" (or similar) and happily change 
> >it to "NO". Save, reboot and let RedHat try to bring the interface up.
> 
> This did the trick.  Why is this?

PNP OS option disables the BIOS doing PNP (ISA and PCI and such)
hardware initialization, leaving that to the OS for anything not
required to boot the OS enough to load drivers.

The 2.6 kernel is supposed to be able to do it, but maybe it's not
entirely complete yet.  2.4 kernels certainly will fail to configure
some devices if the bios has not already assigned resources to the
hardware.

I have seen some network cards, many pcmcia slots, and such fail to work
correctly when PNP OS is enabled.  Many systems ship with it on by
default since Windows prefers it, while at least some motherboards (Asus
at least lately I have seen) have it off by default.  I guess with as
much onboard hardware as they sometimes have, having the BIOS that knows
the board do the resource allocation might be preferable.

Lennart Sorensen
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