Intel DG35EC was (is?) a PC motherboard for Core2 Duo/Quad processor with embedded support for Serial ATA (SATA), PCI Express, Ethernet and USB while still providing support for 3.5" floppy disk drive, IDE hard disks and PCI. Let's not forget PS/2 keyboard and mouse, parallel port and RS-232 (not exposed on the case).
This is probably the last generation of motherboards to support 3.5" FDD, so it is one of the fastest options for a machine that bridges "both worlds". In my case it sits in a minitower case with enough room to swap disks and expansion cards.
It happily boots from FDD, IDE, SATA, USB, network.
Since the primary use of this machine should be to read old disks I preferred to have a form of Linux, to stay away from viruses and have native support for various partition types. The datasheet states that it supports Microsoft Windows.
I booted it with Ubuntu 24 and, even if the MoBo is from 16 years ago, everything worked just fine. I went ahead with installation on a SATA disk. No boot. I've tried every combination of BIOS settings and no, it just sat with a blinking cursor.
Then I plugged an IDE HDD that had Linux on it. Made it the primary boot option and - boom - it booted. So I tried a fresh install on an IDE disk and ... no boot.
In my the experiments to get it boot Linux I had disabled network boot. This switch even broke the boot process of the pre-installed Win7 SATA. WTH!!.
To boot an Intel DG35EC motherboard on Linux my options are (YMMV):
- live CD or USB
- install on HDD but leave bootloader on FDD, USB or CD
- install on HDD on another computer and move the disk (not tried with a fresh install)
Besides this little quirk, it is a fine machine (give it as much DDR2 memory as you can afford, of course). There is "dd" for Windows too which is enough for imaging floppy disks.
Note. I tried forcing the bootloader either on MBR or UEFI and nothing worked. The BIOS does not mention UEFI but it is probably using something very similar as Linux doesn't fall back to MBR.
Note: I tried the same on a DG33BU motherboard and didn't get further, only slower because of the Celeron processor. Most likely all these DG3x motherboards don't support Linux boot after installation.
