Asus motherboard? -- never again!

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 10:14:17AM -0400, Renata Rocha wrote:
>  A long time ago I bought an Asus A7V-something and tried to install
> both Windows Server and Free BSD on my box.
> 
> Windows installation would give me "System Halted" with BSOD after
> almost all steps, and the BSD Kernel wouldn't even boot, with kernel
> panic.
> 
> I found a bunch of people with the same problem. Windows 98 would
> install, but not the Server, and Linux would also run, but not BSD.

I had a similar problem installing win95 around that time.  Turns out
microsoft had an IDE driver bug that meant it could not initialize
reliably on CPUs over 450MHz.  I had to drop the CPU speed to 300MHz,
install, then apply a patch, then put the CPU speed back to normal.
Very likely windows server could have had the same bug back then.

Of course it could have been another problem too.  Some people had no
end of issues with the Via chipsets then (I had a perfectly fine A7V
board though, until a powersupply exploded and unfortunately took out
the board too a few months ago).

> I gave up on Windows and BSDs and kept my box running Linux (it
> wouldn't work even after Bios Update... )
> 
> WEIRD problem. I can't stand Asus after this one. It was followed by a
> Gigabyte, could install anything (well, didn't try Windows)

But what chipset?  That might have made a lot more difference to
installing things than who made the board.

-- 
Len Sroensen
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