Hey guys, reviving this because unfortunately life stuff had prevented me from continuing my tinkering 
Anyway as a recap:
Original card was the Microbotics M1230 XA, w/16MB simm
The card I want to keep and having issues with is a Blizzard 1230 II w/32MB (it has 2 simms).
If I let it boot up from hdd, as is, after I see the blizzard lines flashing and hdd starts to load, it reboots and I get one of those software failure errors (attaching screenshot).
If I interrupt boot (with both mouse buttons) and select to boot with no startup sequence, it loads just fine, and the cli says (running avail) that it sees the 2MB onboard memory and also the 32MB of fast RAM the card has.
So it would seem at least at first glance that something that gets loaded and that was maybe for the other card is causing this to crash. But I%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!8217;m not knowledgeable enough to determine what that is.
What exactly should I look for in the startup sequence? Could it be elsewhere too?
I just a had a look at the manual for the XA
http://amiga.resource.cx/manual/M1230XA.pdfPage 2 covers the included software for the XA. Look for SetXA in the startup-sequence and also AddXAMem in the WBStartup drawer.
When you boot without no startup sequence try typing "ED SYS:s/startup-sequence" in the shell window. This should bring the file up in a basic text editor. If you don't see the SetXA command in there it's worth checking user-startup since it may have been placed there instead.
You can also use the shell to check for and delete the AddXAMem from the WBStartup or use the LoadWB command and do it from within Workbench.
I'm not sure if it works with the 1230 II but later Blizzard cards could be disabled at boot time by holding down "2" in the same way you use the mouse button to bring up the early startup menu.
