I knew I shouldn't have gotten an ASUS mobo. Every single one I've ever had has been a total pile of crap.
Last night, for the first time since I set up this new system, SageTV crashed on me. It didn't bring down the system. WHen I restarted however, Windows went to a blue screen (I don't know if it did it while booting or while shutting down because I wasn't at the display).
Restarting Windows (XP SP2) in SAFE mode brought the system up. Then I shut down, turned off the power and rebooted. System came up as it should and there were no errors in any of the system event logs.
Today I noticed the system wasn't on the network. I go downstairs and see that it's in a restart loop that always stops saying Windows didn't boot properly. No matter what option I pick, including safe mode without networking, the system just blanks the screen and restarts.
Booting from the Windows XP (SP2) DVD produces a "STOP 0x000000A5" error as detailed here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314830The error says that my BIOS is not ACPI compliant and that I can boot and press F7 to omit installing support for ACPI or that I should update the BIOS from the manufacturer.
The first parameter on the error is "11" and this is what that page says about it:
(0x000000011, Parameter2, Parameter3, Parameter4):
The system cannot enter ACPI mode. There are many reasons for this, including:
The system cannot initialize the AML interpreter.
The system cannot find the Root System Description table.
The system cannot allocate a critical driver.
The system cannot load the Root System Description table.
The system cannot load device descriptor blocks.
The system cannot connect an interrupt vector.
The SCI_EN (system control interrupt enable request) cannot be set (see 0x00000001).
The ACPI Table checksum is incorrect.
ACPI is a hierarchical arrangement of tables, each one building upon the next to define the complete capabilities of the system and of every device in the system. ACPI starts by looking for the Root System Description table, which points to the next table, which points to the next table, and so on. Usually, the 0x000000011 error occurs because these tables are damaged or missing.
This is why people are willing to spend extra on a Mac. Shit like this just doesn't happen.
So now I'm about to go look for a BIOS update that for some reason was not required for every boot of the system since last December. No new hardware and no new software has been installed recently.
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