So.. My PSU (Zalman ZM-600HP, should be good stuff) decided to die on me last wednesday, and it seems to have taken my motherboard (Asus P5Q-WS) with it to bit&byte heaven. Luckily both are still under warranty (or should be, at least) so hopefully I can get them replaced soon. Video cards, TV card, Disks and RAID controller escaped the pain, I hope I can say the same of the CPU and the RAM .. but I have no way to say right now.
However, I don’t really like the laptop for much else than sitting in front of TV chatting or surfing a bit, so for serious work I really want my desktop…
Still had an Athlon X2 board lying around, with some PCI Express slots, CPU, RAM, etc, so decided to build this in – after all, my offboard RAID controller should be OK to take along to a new system, no INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE for me!
However… the ARC-1200 is not compatible with the A8N-SLI Premium… board simply doesn’t boot if you put it in any of the PCIe slots. So I took an 8-port PCIe Areca from the spare parts, as that could read my RAID on the disks at least; but this lead to INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE because the PCI ID’s of the 2_port and the 8-port weren’t the same.
My wif’s PC to the rescue, put both Areca’s in, with the disks connected to the 2-port, this allowed me to install the 8-port’s drivers in Windows, then moved it all back to my own temporary PC… Yes, no stop 7B … but stop 7E?!
The machine booted in safe mode, so I was on the right track, and after some googling and fiddling, turns out you can’t down/upgrade easily from an Intel to an AMD CPU, as you will get the 7E stop.
Details are here – I didn’t get the info from this page (seeing as it talks about Virtual PC), instead clicked through on some forums, but it contains the solution none the less. Disabling the IntelPPM driver makes the crash go away (as is to be expected, this is an AMD CPU after all).
Had to reactivate Windows again but that was no biggie.. hope it will still reactivate when I have an RMA board.. 🙂