Asus M2V Motherboard

[Slammer64]

While I have been registered here awhile, I have never posted before because I usually could solve my problems by reading the various posts, but now I am stumped. I recently purchased a Asus M2V motherboard and installed it with no problem using 2 1gig sticks of Patriot DDR2 6400 ram, an AMD64 3200+ Orleans single core, a nVidia 6800 Ultra PCI-X video card and a Maxtor 6V200E 200 gig Sata 1 hard drive. Now, when I first tried to install my usual Linux distro (Suse 10.1 x86_64) no joy, so I figured I'd try another (Fedora Core 5 x86_64) same thing, then another (Kubuntu 6.0.6 LTS AMD64) same thing again.......all fail to install. So I figured, what the hell, I'll try Gentoo, our sysadmin swears by the stuff. Well, I downloaded the AMD64 Universal install disc and start, not much of a problem, just doesn't recognize most of my onboard hardware, I figure that after I install a new kernel, it'll be fine..................nope. In get it installed and it does boot, wonder of wonders! But it still didn't recognize my hardware even using kernel 2.6.17-gentoo-r2. Kept giving me a "Unrecognized VIA Southbridge, disabling dma!" error message. Ok, I figured to use the VIA patches available on their website, find out they are patches for SuSE, Fedore, and Mandriva, and old versions at that. Then I figured that I would just do a little manual patching based on their patch, patched the /usr/linux/include/linux/pci.ids.c and the /usr/src/linux/driver/ide/pci/via82cxxx.c files. So far, not too bad. Recompile, reboot and it recognizes my southbridge, but guess what? DMA still not enabled! Ok, back to kernel recompiling, made sure that force_dma on older drives was unchecked, recompiled............no joy, Take pity on an old man and lay some good news on me soon. Thanks
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[interested1]

I am not sure I totally followed the last part of your post, but you said