ASUS P5K-E MB, BIOS 1004 caused server blue screen...
for testing hyper-v and windows hpc server 2008, I just bought a new server with:
- ASUS P5K-E Mother board x 1
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 CPU (4 core) x 1
- nVidia GeForce 8500GT with 256MB DDR2 RAM, PCI-Express x 16 x 1
- CFD (UMAX) DDR-2 800 2GB Memory x 4
- Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm SATA 500gb HDD x 4
- Owltech 700W Power supply x 1
- Owltech OWL-612-SLT/N Series Case x 1
this should allow me to run about 8 concurrent hyper-v vm without big problems and with acceptable speed, I guess... (for overcoming the disk bottleneck, got 4 physical disks to run 2 vm per disk).
Assembled the whole thing at last Sat. running well at Sunday and I upgraded the bios to version 1004 since the out-of-factory bios version 0906 didn't recognize Q9450 CPU. and on Monday, when starting running vm concurrently, blue screen occured.
on the first blue screen the message was "PFN_LIST_CURRUPT", by referencing the KB, thought it should be the memory problem, so I just shuffled the orders of those 4 RAMs and still got blue screen of every combinations. but when putting each one RAM only, the test was without problems. by the way how I test for the blue screen is to copy a big file from C drive (I got 4 disks with 8 logical drives, and I just made a win2k8 full sysprep-ed vhd file which is around 8gb) concurrently to D: , E: , F: , G:, H:, I:, J: drives. this always cause blue screen with various error messages (Page fault error, PFN_LIST_CURRUPT, etc) .
the last way to do was to upgrade to the latest "testing version" of ASUS P5K-E bois, version 1006, and after upgraded, the blue screen just vanished!! as the ASUS site didn't write any descriptions about this update, I don't know what was patched on this version. only knew that my server now gets stable for me to run a steady testing environment...
FYI.
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