Strangest technical problem ever?

[lost_soul]

I have a Gigabyte 970a-ud3 based system which dual-boots Debian 6 and Windows 7. A wile ago, I had major networking troubles in Linux one day and I spent hours trying to track it down. When I boot to Windows, some driver "does" something to my motherboard. If I boot to Linux again, I get constantly disconnected. I can go into a game and it will lag every six seconds or so and then start working correctly, only to lag again. Ping requests frequently fail, even to the local router.

 

The solution seems to be setting the BIOS back to fail-safe defaults. I suspect the "on/off charger" driver that I installed in Windows is causing this problem. After I boot to Windows, it doesn't matter if I power off completely and disconnect the machine. I have to reset the BIOS to have proper networking in Debian again. Now the question is what the hell that driver (not sure which one it is yet) is doing to the motherboard to make this necessary?

 

Maybe if I boot to safe mode in Windows and remove all the unnecessary drivers, it won't happen again.

[PranQster]

Format the windows partition to ext4 and run Debian only... problem solved

LOL, on a more serious note, this is new to me. I didn't think a windows driver could affect networking hardware like that.

One alternative could be to install a second ethernet card and use it when using Debian instead of the on-board eth.

[lost_soul]

Well, I figured it out. It was the "on/off charge" feature that was causing the trouble and NOT the network driver. On/off charging implies changing something on the motherboard by its very nature: the system doesn't do that by default. Whatever it changed was causing the network issues, and I have no need for on/off charge. So, by removing that driver alone, it worked around the problem.

[Serpentine]

I've had this experience with a good few older Intel mobos, off hand I can think of 3 occasions and I think 2 were 865 and one 845?.

 

Anyway, pretty much the box will be working perfectly, someone will shut down for the night and then in the morning it wont post, fans spin and everything makes noises that sound correct - drives spin up when expected. Taking apart everything and reseating it, using other drives, no dimms etc... nothing fixes it.

 

What does fix it? when the board is installed, pulling on the right hand side of the board, as if you were going to try pull it towards you. Somehow this magic touch has fixed this issue. I have yet to work out the cause, perhaps bad traces - but I've seen people struggle for two days to fix one of these, I come in, pull the board edge and suddenly it's happy.

 

Another fun one - a broken power service in windows will mean that you cant use your soundcard. Graphics cards? fine. TV tuner? fine. NIC? Wireless? everything is fine. Sound starts and reports no problems. Takes a long ass time to work out that the power service is unhappy (and even if it is, it sometimes shows as running correctly - no log messages either.)