Asus p5n-d and SSD gray screen of death

[Pagey]

Ran into something yesterday that I'd never seen before: a friend put a new 128 adata SSD into his Intel Q6600 box with an Asus p5n-d motherboard. The board saw the SSD, and the Windows 7 installer saw the SSD. It would load Windows, "complete" the install, and then reboot. The Winwows 7 splash screen would load fine, but then it would just go to a dark, gray screen and sit...no "preparing your desktop for first use" etc. No HDD activity light either, but you could see the white mouse cursor and move it around. I see that most, if not all, of these mobos don't support AHCI. I'm not sure if that is a make or break issue, but I'd be remiss to point it out. All the other HDDs were unplugged during the install. At first I thought he had a bad install disc which might have botched some files, but we repeated the results with a different ISO and mint install media. Anyone seen the "gray screen of death" before?

[morphine]

1) You need AHCI support for an SSD to work properly (no exceptions as far as I know).
2) Make sure the SSD's firmware is updated. Many drives had initial issues with their firmware, especially Sandforce-powered ones.

[Pagey]

I suspect the board or the SSD firmware, too, but I haven't heard back from him this week.