Hello, folks. I'm posting this here for the benefit of someone else who may run into this problem for the same reasons as I. I recently upgraded my motherboard from A8N-SLI Deluxe to A8N32-SLI Deluxe. I'm slowly but surely moving to x2 platform.
Old system:
- Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe
- AMD Athlon64 3700+
- 4GB Corsair Valuwhatever Discount RAM. PC3200. These four DIMMs are the same model # and same manufacturer, but they were made at different times. Each DIMM pair has a different font on it's product label and some other very subtle differences. For this reason, I keep each DIMM paired with it's twin. This is important.
- 300gb SATA and a 200gb SATA
- Nvidia pci-ex 6800GS
Everything ran perfectly in the A8N-SLI board. I highly recommend it. As I stated above, the first step on my long dual-core journey was to get a motherboard capable, so I selected the A8N32-SLI Deluxe. I installed everything onto the new motherboard just as I had the old one, including the DIMM pairing. To my delight, it POSTed on first bootup and booted right to the XP Pro CD; away I went with the installation.
Problem: The first reboot following installation resulted in a blue screen of death. Stop 0x000000A5: The BIOS in this system is not fully ACPI compliant. blahblahblah, please rerun setup and press F7 to auto-select a different HAL for installation. I reran setup with the F7 recommendation, and the next bootup gave me a different error: "You have no hard drive space _or_ your video card is broken." WTH? At this point it's safe to conclude that niether of the error messages are genuine but that something else is seriously wrong.
The solution, strangely enough, was my DIMM placement. On my A8N32-SLI, banks 1 and 3 are both colored blue, while banks 2 and 4 are colored black. It's this way on my old board as well, so I paired the DIMMs exactly the same way on the assumption that a minor detail like this would not have changed. Wrong was I. Even though banks 1 and 3 are colored blue, for whatever reason, they are not acting as a pair like they did on my old board. Instead of spreading DIMM pair #1 into banks 1 and 3, I placed them into banks 1 and 2 (1 blue 1 black). I did the same for my second pair of DIMMs and every single problem vanished just as quickly.
I've got two guesses at this point:
1) One of my DIMMs is bad or doesn't play well with this motherboard. They've all been memtested, but I'll memtest them again in the new board. I'm not sure this is the case, as both pairs booted independent of the other pair, but only if I had one blue and one black. The problem only went away if both DIMMS were next to each other, in any order.
2) Asus conspired to give me grief when I upgraded from their old board to this one. For whatever reason, the way I've been pairing and installing my DIMMs is no longer the way to do things. This would be further strengthened by the somnolent sermons I received during both calls to their tech support. Note that of the two times I called them, not once did I get someone who actually listened to my problem or suggested anything whatsoever.
Instead, I got these options:
1) Flash the BIOS. (It's current already.. shipped that way.)
2) Flash it again.
3) Clear CMOS, try it all over again.
4) Order a new BIOS chip.
Seriously. They read this to me like a script and didn't pay attention to anything else I said. I realize tech support never pays enough for "true" engineers to answer the phones.. but it's still saddening that the best motherboard company in the business can't do better than that for tech support.
Old system:
- Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe
- AMD Athlon64 3700+
- 4GB Corsair Valuwhatever Discount RAM. PC3200. These four DIMMs are the same model # and same manufacturer, but they were made at different times. Each DIMM pair has a different font on it's product label and some other very subtle differences. For this reason, I keep each DIMM paired with it's twin. This is important.
- 300gb SATA and a 200gb SATA
- Nvidia pci-ex 6800GS
Everything ran perfectly in the A8N-SLI board. I highly recommend it. As I stated above, the first step on my long dual-core journey was to get a motherboard capable, so I selected the A8N32-SLI Deluxe. I installed everything onto the new motherboard just as I had the old one, including the DIMM pairing. To my delight, it POSTed on first bootup and booted right to the XP Pro CD; away I went with the installation.
Problem: The first reboot following installation resulted in a blue screen of death. Stop 0x000000A5: The BIOS in this system is not fully ACPI compliant. blahblahblah, please rerun setup and press F7 to auto-select a different HAL for installation. I reran setup with the F7 recommendation, and the next bootup gave me a different error: "You have no hard drive space _or_ your video card is broken." WTH? At this point it's safe to conclude that niether of the error messages are genuine but that something else is seriously wrong.
The solution, strangely enough, was my DIMM placement. On my A8N32-SLI, banks 1 and 3 are both colored blue, while banks 2 and 4 are colored black. It's this way on my old board as well, so I paired the DIMMs exactly the same way on the assumption that a minor detail like this would not have changed. Wrong was I. Even though banks 1 and 3 are colored blue, for whatever reason, they are not acting as a pair like they did on my old board. Instead of spreading DIMM pair #1 into banks 1 and 3, I placed them into banks 1 and 2 (1 blue 1 black). I did the same for my second pair of DIMMs and every single problem vanished just as quickly.
I've got two guesses at this point:
1) One of my DIMMs is bad or doesn't play well with this motherboard. They've all been memtested, but I'll memtest them again in the new board. I'm not sure this is the case, as both pairs booted independent of the other pair, but only if I had one blue and one black. The problem only went away if both DIMMS were next to each other, in any order.
2) Asus conspired to give me grief when I upgraded from their old board to this one. For whatever reason, the way I've been pairing and installing my DIMMs is no longer the way to do things. This would be further strengthened by the somnolent sermons I received during both calls to their tech support. Note that of the two times I called them, not once did I get someone who actually listened to my problem or suggested anything whatsoever.
Instead, I got these options:
1) Flash the BIOS. (It's current already.. shipped that way.)
2) Flash it again.
3) Clear CMOS, try it all over again.
4) Order a new BIOS chip.
Seriously. They read this to me like a script and didn't pay attention to anything else I said. I realize tech support never pays enough for "true" engineers to answer the phones.. but it's still saddening that the best motherboard company in the business can't do better than that for tech support.
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