Posted inExperience / Information Technology

Asus Pro B760M-CT CSM

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek1
new machine

Years ago I promised myself I would never build another computer. Been buying HP and Lenovo (mostly HP) off-lease small form factor desktops and that massive HP z820 you’ve read about. Well there have been some contracts calling that almost sound interesting and almost pay enough to get me to sign. Most of these contracts would have me doing a lot more Yocto work than I normally do . . . and . . . I had new machine itch. Let us not overlook the fact I wanted to drop from over seven machines in the office to under four. Once per decade you just have to purge your spare machines, spare parts, and older spare drives.

Please do not forget, I live rural. When I choose to buy or build another computer, I have to acquire spare parts. If a client is willing to pay me to work on a Sunday, I don’t want a keyboard, power supply, or hard drive failure blocking that revenue stream. Sadly, when I’m done with a project, said machines usually end up in the BOINC rack trying to cure cancer, etc.

Buy Another Computer

When you are old, fat, lazy, and not destitute for funds the knee-jerk impulse is to buy. Been having good luck with HP machines. They still make “engineering models.” That means they come with (at least headers for) serial and parallel ports. Generally they also have PS/2 ports.

Before you wet-behind-the-ears kids start dissing those requirements, you always need serial ports in embedded systems development. Even that Raspberry Pi you love to play with has a serial port buried in that 50 or so pin header. Most new motherboards, especially those which allow no-CPU-installed BIOS updates provide a serial debug header on the board. Some long-life devices that only needed to transmit small amounts of data will communicate via PS/2. I haven’t seen one in a while, but I still have a stack of perfectly good PS/2 keyboards and mice. Yes, I have USB keyboards and mice too.

So, I went onto the HP Web site and chose to custom build a computer. Chose 120+GB of RAM, 2TB M.2 drive, 6TB spinning disk, all the ports, “Linux Ready” so it didn’t have an OS, and a few other things like DVD R/W, etc. Wish I would have saved the listing. $8+K price tag. Yes, I like to pee money away on my computers, but I’m also a cheap bastard. A price tag like that leaves me walking funny.

Build Another Computer

Asus has finally caught on. They are building some “business” motherboards again. New Egg didn’t have this Pro B760M-CT-CSM in stock, but the Asus eStore did. It was even on sale for $120. It checked all the boxes. A 13th-gen CPU is more than enough. Headers for two serial ports. Two PS/2 ports. Even has a header for a parallel port. Let’s build another computer, or at least price it out!

NewEgg doesn’t even list the 2 serial port header bracket I ordered for under $20 anymore. Cables2Go had a parallel port header bracket that I just ordered this morning for around $20. I had a DVD R/W sitting on shelf along with keyboard and mouse. Though it pains me, I have one client that insists I use Microsoft Office for their documentation. They don’t like Office, but their Design History Files and templates for the medical devices they build are all using Word templates. Either redo everything or just continue to endure Office. Now that Microsoft is making it almost impossible to get a version of Office you can install sans subscription, the redo everything option is sounding better. Thankfully I had Windows 10 license and installation media that was still good.

$1486 before tax and shipping. Yes, I bought some extra stuff I didn’t need or yet use.

Observations

I’m not generally a fan of “ooooh look at the colors” computer interriors.

The filter on the side panel is of piss poor design.

You can barely see the tiny tab in the deep notched V’s. They are supposed to go in the holes below.

Not the round holes, the rectangles. After the third time it fell off and started making a bunch of rattling noise I took it out.

CSM – Humiliating Kick to the Crotch

At first I thought my Windows 10 installation media had gone bad. Once everything was installed, the machine kept booting into BIOS. I stuck in a Linux Mint 21 or something thumb drive and it booted just fine. WTF? Well, in order to try and sell you new installation media/licenses and such, Intel has decided to abandon support for MBR. That’s right. After a lot of searching I stuck my installation media in a Linux machine and ran GNU Disks to see old fashioned MBR boot media.

You see this highlighted white because I did the one and only work around.

Install an old video card

Despite what you find online, I had to actually hook the monitors to it. Some claim you can just have the card. Others claim once you change the setting you can remove the card and all is well. Not on this motherboard or with the latest firmware. Honestly, I don’t think that was ever true. If it was, certainly wasn’t true for a 13th-gen.

I got everything installed and took the card out to test that. Booted straight back into BIOS. Why? The MBR Windows 10 installation media creates an MBR Windows partition.

Regular users can use the Community Edition of Paragon Partition Manager found here. Once installed and started, right click on your boot disk and you should see a menu option offering to convert from MBR to GPT.

Mine shows it going the other way because I’m done. Yes, I will end up buying the $100 commercial version even though I’m not billable simply because this saved me a lot of time. I am, in theory, setting this machine up for new contract. Many people ask me when I will retire and I just can’t bring myself to do it. I mean I have been semi-retired for more than a decade. Work like a dog when on-site then unwind doing physical labor back on the farm. Can’t really see a reason to change.

Once you convert to GPT:

  • Power down
  • Remove add-in video card
  • Don’t worry, your BIOS will automatically change back to CSM. When you boot into BIOS this time just save and restart.

Second Humiliating Kick to the Crotch

Ironically, when you choose to build another computer, the motherboard doesn’t come with a driver disk anymore. Thank God I had my trusty old Big Ugly Blue.

It is so ancient that every OS made in the last two decades has drivers for it. Why did I need this? The chipset for the LAN port wasn’t in the base Windows 10 install. When you go to “Drives & Tools” and select Windows 10, it isn’t in anything you download there either. One has to get that from Intel. It was so much nicer when you got a CD with an auto-run on it. Might not have had all the drivers you needed, but could get you functional.

You Will Still be Missing Drivers

This part was really annoying. Even after installing everything I could get from Asus, I still had this.

Tech Support chat wasn’t open. I pulled down a BIOS update. When you unzip the BIOS update, use a thumb drive no larger than 8GB. I used a 16GB at first and the F3 Flash boot option refused to show it. Put it on an 8GB thumb drive and the CAP file popped right up.

Yes, you will have to go back through and adjust your BIOS settings. Hopefully you didn’t have a RAID configuration because there were notes about having to redo those.

The Last Device

Device ACPI\INTC1085\2&daba3ff&0 requires further installation

DEvice manager

Part of me should be happy I was down to one. I magically stumbled onto the location of that driver. It’s the Serial IO. Yes, I ran a virus scanner on it. There was a message thread about it on an Asus gamer site. Once I installed a shiny new copy of Terabyte Image for Windows, created boot media and did a bare metal back up, I was good to go.

Summary

Yes, theoretically, $8K paid to HP would have saved me mucho frustration. Had I needed the machine for a currently billable project I probably would have done just that. Yicking around with this for the better part of a day and a half would not have been good. When you currently aren’t billable and you are just waiting for the crops to get ready for harvest, you have the time to be cheap.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.