Hello,

We are trying to setup a new box with:
- Antec Titan Box
- Tyan 2932G2NR motherboard
- 2 Opteron 2350
- 8 corsair 1GB memory modules
and install Linux on it.

Each distro we have tested (Cent OS, Debian, Ubuntu desktop, Ubuntu server, Gentoo, and so on) can n not be installed... Only FreeBSD in *32bits version* is working (we did not check any other 32 bit distribution) The error is not always the same. e.g. with Cent OS (netinstall) we have:

HARDWARE ERROR
CPU 0: Machine check exception: 4 bank: blah-blah-bla (a long number)
TSC (a number)
This is not a software error
Use mcelog to understand...

The way is:
- we have tested memory with the latest memtest8-+ tool ;
- we have tested CPUs ona secondary MB ;
- we tried with only one CPU (CPU0 + 2 GB of memory)
*without* any success...

Any help would appreciated.
Best regards
Philippe

For 8GB of memory, you need the 64-bit version of Linux. 32-bit can only handle up to 4GB of memory.

32bit linux supports full 4gb cool!

Well I'm not too sure if it will use all 4GB, but it should recognize like 3.5 GB of it or so. It's kind of complicated to explain, but here's a link:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000811.html

It looks to me as a hardware error with your motherboard and CPU IMC but at early stages I can no way be sure.

What exactly is the motherboard model?
Tyan 2932G2NR is quite a generic name that I could not track back but the only similar ones we have are Tyan 2932G2NR-E and Tyan S2932WG2NR. Is yours any of these?

Which version of BIOS are you on?
Also, which power supply are you using.... not the Antec TruePower 2.0 TP-550EPS12V I hope.

Try the 64-bit version of FreeBSD. 64-bit will aggravate memory and CPU IMC far more than 32-bit can and if either of them are faulty or problematic, it will error very quickly which will give us some more insight. Most likely it won't even boot in those cases. http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/amd64.html