A8N32 Build Hell!!!

[PhrazeMaster]

Hi all, I have had significant build issues on a system with an A8N32 Sli Deluxe board, 74 GB Raptor drive, Twin Corsair Memory (2G). If you're up for a story of length, read on.

The problem is that after letting the box sit for about 30 minutes, on bootup I get a message "Disk Read Error. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart". Brand new Raptor and all equipment, mind you.

I have gotten a variety of other strange errors as well, such as the system locking up at recognizing the second hard drive, just sitting there at recognizing 4th IDE master. Sometimes it boots to there and hangs. Other times it boots to the Windows x64 screen and hangs. Sometimes it boots to a blank screen.

Now here is some more background. I called Asus and they said, sounds like a bad motherboard capacitor, or a bad power supply. Great, someplace to start. I had the vendor, Monarch computer, swap out the board for me. They were great, no hassles, right away, boom new board. Same issues.

I also swapped the power supply, ram, hard drive(s), CASE (yeah i know), processor...actually the only thing I never swapped was the video card.

I also chased down the Disk Read Error, and according to WD's website, this is not a problem with the hard drive, it is a disk geometry error and should be fixable via Windows Recovery Console. So I followed their instructions and booted with the x64 CD ROM into the Recovery Console, did a CHKDSK /r to repair the install (and it did find problems), as well as FIXMBR. This did not solve the issues.

I have built many computers, even using this board without this kind of trouble. My customer is waiting. I was up ALL NIGHT last night trolling every board I could think of for clues. I discovered this board indeed has a lot of problems, but they probably all do if you are looking for them.

I neglected to mention I am using the SATA I and II ports for the hard drives. One is a Raptor, the other a WD2500MKS. I have also swapped out the SATA cables, several times in fact, and updated all drivers to the very latest. I have probably spent over a 100 hours on this build, seriously, over about 5 months, its absolutely ridiculous at this point, I don't know what else to do. The one contant seems to be, the system works like a charm after about 2-3 bootups, but on initial bootup after it having been off for 30-45 minutes, it hangs with the aforementioned issues.

I'M IN HELL. HELL-P!

 

[Billb2]

What CPU and PSU?

 

[PhrazeMaster]

Opteron 170

PC Power and Cooling TurboCool 510

Corsair Ram as indicated in specs for mb

GeForce 6200

NZXT case

NO overclocking of any sort whatsoever, all stock defaults

I'm about ready to just give up on this build and swap the board for another manuf/ I can't think of what else to do...i must be missing SOMETHING!!!

Thanks for any input

 

[Nocturnal]

Have you updated the BIOS to the latest available BIOS?

Also since you say that you get stuck on the 4th IDE being detected, have you removed ALL hard drives except for the Raptor? I'd try that. Have you run diagnostics on both hard drives to rule those two out?

 

[n7]

Why why oh why use x64. Use Windows XP (not x64).

Sure it works great for some people. Some people.

I'm sure it has something to do with your issue.

 

[PhrazeMaster]

Yes, latest bios. Yes, removed all but the raptor hd. i have a similar system with x64 without troubles to answer the next post. have not run hd diagnostics, but have used other hard drives but still got problems with them as well. made me think it was the board, even though it was a swapped out one, brand new. i'm doing my best, but obviously not hitting some mark here. i can't understand why i would be getting these issues before booting into x64. once in x64, no problems.

what diagnostics should i run on the hd's?

thanks

 

[McPudd]

A few things I made sure to do when I built 2 systems (XP Pro SP2 and MCE2005) with this mainboard.

Enable the Parallel port in BIOS whether you need it or not.
Do not use nVidia's IDE drivers. Keep what MS installs.
Leave the Primary IDE connector open and use the Secondary IDE connector for your disc drive(s).

If you get repeated chkdsk scans at boot, your HDDs may be detected as dirty.
If so, try this:

Fix repeating chkdsk at boot. (unset dirty bit)
In the following substitute problem disk letter for B.
Start >Run [type] CMD [Enter]
[type] fsutil dirty query B: [Enter]
Should tell you disk is dirty.
[type] CHKNTFS /X B: [Enter]
That disk will not be checked just next time.
Manually reboot the computer.
CHKDSK should be skipped this one time.
In Windows Start >Run [type] CMD [Enter]
[type] Chkdsk /f /r b: [Enter]
This 5 stage scan should unset the dirty bit.
To check ?
[type] fsutil dirty query B: [Enter]
The disk should not be reported as dirty.
CHKDSK should not keep scanning the disk.

Happy trailz,

 

[PhrazeMaster]

Thanks for your thoughtful reply.

If people in hell die and go to a worse hell, I'm there.

Now the video has stopped working. Completely, no signal. Swapped it for another video card that works, still nothing. The lights on the front of the case stopped coming on.

This looks like a dead motherboard, which would explain EVERYTHING. Except, this is the 3rd friggin NEW motherboard of the exact same model I've tried. And hell if they are all bad. When I ran disk utilities as suggested by another poster, nothing was found to be wrong with the hard drives, and actually the computer happily worked for a few hours, without all the attendant previous problems.

What do you guys think...is there REALLY this bad a QC at Asus, or should I just go get my head chopped off now while I can still think?

:disgust:

 

[spittledip]

PSU

 

[keldog7]

Tough one... Sounds like the quantum electron spatializer might be going bad though. You don't live near a dimensional wormhole do you? I hear that gravitationaal singularities occasionally cause this error too....

But seriously, it sound slike you've swapped eveything out of the rig - maybe you should check the hardware with another OS - there might be some aspect of x64 windows which has a driver conflict on your hardware etc etc etc = ERRORs. I very recently had a 7900GTX installed, which produced alot of artifacts EXACTLY like people describe with the faulty cards. I would get the artifacts within seconds of booting up...to Windows. And that was in spite of GPU BIOS, MB BIOS, driver upgrades etc etc. The kicker was that the whole rig worked FLAWLESSLY under linux.

So...my suggestion... Track down the latest version of Knoppix (5.0?), and burn yourself a copy. Reboot from that CD (Knoppix won't touch the data on the HDD unless you force it to...which is hard to do initentionally, and nigh impossible to do "by accident") into Knoppix and fool around for a while. If it doesn't crap outon you, then maybe Windows is the problem. If it DOES crap out on you, maybe you'll be able to get some better error information, from the various logging capabilities of a linux box.

Best of luck
-A