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Never buy the Foxconn G9657MA-8EKRS2H Motherboard for OS X!


Galen
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I have spent an enormous amount of time fighting with this stupid motherboard. Bottom line: don't waste your time on it.

 

I have never seen anything like this board. The first one I got was defective and occasionally froze while in the BIOS screen. It also exhibited countless erratic behavior with the boot device. I concluded this was a defective motherboard and returned it.

 

I replaced it with a brand new one, and encountered the same problem with the boot device. Older BIOSes, newer BIOSes, you name it. I've used boot devices over SATA, PATA, USB, you name it. I've tried every BIOS configuration you could imagine. 10.4, 10.5, every varying package. I've replaced the RAM, the CPU, the PSU... every variable has been investigated. I am not an idiot, but the erratic nature of this motherboard has made investigation very difficult.

 

Basically, if you want to use Darwin or OS X, this is not the motherboard for you. It will NOT reliably boot into the operating system. It will work great a few times, then not work for many more tries, then mysteriously start working again. It either gets stuck with the Darwin bootloader not seeing the boot volume (even with a SATA hard drive or SATA optical drive, sometimes it can only detect the LAN boot for example) or boots but then gets stuck waiting for the boot UUID device.

 

I hope this saves somebody the countless hours I have wasted with this stupid motherboard.

 

Please disregard any following posts in this thread by me!

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Hi

I have one of these range of motherboards from Foxconn.

My set up is sata dvd drive, 2 sata hd, core 2 duo 6600, nvidia gt7600.

All of the drives are set to the sata mode, jmicro is turned off.

The dvd drive is not the first sata port, it doesn't seem to matter what port

the hd's are on! The system seems to be fully functional, except for sound and networking.

The fix for sound is on http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?sho...0&hl=alc883

The fix for networking http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=34446

All the updates work! except the one for sound!

Hope this helps

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Hi

Set the "OnChip IDE device" to ACHI and "OnBoard device" JMB361 ide controller to disable.

I finde when setting "OnChip IDE device" to ACHI when you reboot you have to sort out the

boot priority (DVD, HD), but once you have done that then it will stay like that until changed again.

I don't have the floopy disk controller on (don't have a floppy disk drive).

Also the BIOS is the most uptodate.

Hope this helps

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Regardless of the best effects on my part, aiming to duplicate your settings as well as experiment around in other ways, I still cannot get past the com.apple.Boot.plist error from the USB optical drive.

 

However, transferring a bootable disk onto my SATA hard drive appears to work!

 

So... anybody out there... it seems USB optical drives and this motherboard do not work!!

 

If anybody has more suggestions on making direct on-system installs work, I'd be very open to hearing your suggestions!

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A few more pieces of information for anybody with this motherboard:

 

Yes, this motherboard will do a very nice job running OS X, as long as you're prepared to deal with the twists and turns!

 

Be sure to update the BIOS on this motherboard before proceeding. A new BIOS came out recently. The BIOS that came with my board out of the box was very buggy - it did not boot from USB drives at all (no OSes), would randomly forget boot drive settings, and also would freeze in the BIOS screen sometimes.

 

For installing OS X, a SATA optical drive is a must. Alternatively, the indirect method where OS X is installed using another machine (physical or virtual like vmware) can be used - I tested this and it works. USB optical drives do NOT work for booting - I have tested several different types and found they all fail to properly boot with the infamous com.apple.Boot.plist error, even with the latest BIOS.

 

The BIOS SATA mode must be set to AHCI in order for OS X to boot properly - set to IDE, OS X hangs when partially booted. This also appears to allow Disk Utility.app to work properly with SATA drives in my tests.

 

When you switch to AHCI mode, you need to reboot, then review the boot drive options again. When using a SATA optical drive, you must find the exact drive in the list (e.g. SONY DVD-RW) because broad device classes (e.g. CD-ROM) do not work properly. If you do not reboot after activating AHCI, you cannot select the exact device name for booting purposes.

 

In my installation tests, I simply disabled the entire JMicron controller. However, this is probably overkill.

 

If you get stuck while booting OS X with a line starting with "Apple16x50UARTSync1" - it is a problem relating to your PS/2 keyboard/mouse. Try unplugging them and using a USB setup instead.

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Well, this is quite a mystery:

 

It appears the Apple16x50UARTSync1 issue is random.

 

It also appears the system will randomly experience issues relating to waiting to access the drive by UUID.

 

These issues are extremely difficult to troubleshoot because they are all intermittent. I will conduct further tests as time allows and see if I can isolate the cause. It does not make sense that a cleanly rebooted system would act differently each time it was rebooted, even when reading off a read-only optical disc.

 

However, once booted, the system appears to function normally.

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I am done with this particular motherboard. It seems to occasionally freeze while in the BIOS screen during boot and while interacting with the BIOS interface. This suggests it is defective.

 

I am RMAing this motherboard, and in a week or two when I have a replacement, I will hopefully have a more useful conclusion.

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  • 4 weeks later...
I am done with this particular motherboard. It seems to occasionally freeze while in the BIOS screen during boot and while interacting with the BIOS interface. This suggests it is defective.

 

I am RMAing this motherboard, and in a week or two when I have a replacement, I will hopefully have a more useful conclusion.

same here with my 945g7md-8EKRS2H microatx motherboard.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have replaced the motherboard. The good news is that the BIOS no longer appears to freeze and such. I feel immensely better!

 

After applying the BIOS update, the system seems to be behaving properly if you follow the below steps regarding drive configurations. I am using SATA optical and hard drives. Before the update, it would hang during the boot process with boot device UUID related issues.

 

To save everybody a GREAT deal of time and trouble, I have prepared an ISO (attached to this post) which will update your BIOS when burned onto a CD-R or DVD±R.

 

I went to this address:

http://www.foxconnchannel.com/EN-US/suppor...ID=en-gb0000002

 

I downloaded the file "631F1P57.BIN" plus suitable boot and flash executables and created an El Torito-compliant bootable disk image. This update should be suitable for the G9657MA-8EKRS2H and G9657MA-8KS2H motherboards and worked well on mine. I cannot take any responsibility for this software, as I am not the author.

 

Once burned, simply set the BIOS to boot from your optical drive and wait for the command line prompt to come up. When it does, here is what you will type (no quotes, case-sensitive):

 

"cd BIOS"

<return>

 

"AFU865.EXE"

<return>

 

When it prompts you for the filename, enter:

"631F1P57.BIN"

 

From there, simply follow the on-screen prompts and your BIOS will be updated!

biosdisc.iso.gz

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Also of note, if your machine is still hanging during boot for some reason, go into the BIOS and choose "Load Optimized Defaults" which will cause the machine to rebuild the DMI pool fully, which seems to correct this problem.

 

It is unclear precisely what is causing this, but if you have issues with boot uuid device or other hanging (different errors with 10.5) during verbose booting, that's the thing to do!

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  • 1 month later...
  • 1 year later...
  • 11 months later...

I have this foxconn motherboard and I am trying to install using Iatkos v7, the install works fine however once it has done all the verbose stuff (-v) I just get a blank screen. This board does not have a built in graphics card so that could be the problem because I am using an ATI HD radeon 2600. Please help!

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