The Flow of Consciousness

I received a few days ago an ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe motherboard for review at ThinkComputers. I finally got some time to install it today, replacing the Foxconn C51XEM2AA motherboard I’d been using since October.

The first order of business was to work on the review, so I slid in an extra hard drive and installed Windows XP Professional 64-bit onto it before I replaced the Foxconn board. I had no problems at all—I was able to finish the entirety of the benchmark suite without a single crash.

So, with that having been completed, I went about swapping the boards. The ASUS board is pretty neat—there’s a lot of heat pipes and passive cooling, and even a memory cooler. I’m not going to go on and on about it here; read the review when it gets posted.

I booted it, and was immediately prompted to reactivate Windows. I had to wait until I installed the NIC driver to do so, but it went through without a problem. I installed the remainder of the drivers and started benchmarking.

Then, it started: BLUE SCREENS GALORE. I doubled checked all of the packages I’d downloaded to ensure they were all 64-bit packages. Obviously, they were. So, I dealt with it. Windows would crash with STOP 0×50: PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA or something like that. It means that a driver, in this case disk.sys, tried to access a piece of memory that didn’t exist.

I figured that Windows didn’t like the motherboard swap, so I’d save myself a little bit of time and do a repair installation. Not only did the repair installation crap out near the end, but it didn’t help. When I finally got it up and running, I had to reactivate Windows. I still had consistent stop errors.

I decided to do a full re-installation. This time, I’d used all of my activations and had to spend 15 minutes on the phone with Microsoft’s activation people to get that squared away.

I still have blue screens. They are random, they are without warning. I seem to be the only person having this problem, as searches turn up nothing useful.

Frustrated and wanting to give up on Windows and get some other work done, I switched back to my other hard drive (I’d pulled its SATA cable to prevent myself from accidentally munging my Ubuntu install and my coveted save games and media files from previous builds on my Windows install). I didn’t want to mess with Windows at all, so I booted Ubuntu.

It booted straight up. It was like I’d not even switched the boards. Restricted Drivers Manager automatically enabled the Atheros drivers required for the built-in WiFi module. It recognized all the new devices without a hitch, and transparently! I’d even switched the hard drive’s SATA channels, something I figured would throw off GRUB (the bootloader) and frustrate me even more. Nope.

Can Windows survive a motherboard switch? No.
Can Ubuntu, and probably most other Linuxes, survive a motherboard switch? Yes.