Good Evening Everyone,
I believe that I have some "Good News" to share with you with regard to my continuing problems with bootup on the N680i board. I took some very good advice from our colleague Mr. Gary, and wiped out the CMOS settings, and then rebooted. Then I set the "Optimized Defaults" (which was apparently a mistake), and then shut down, rebooted, and set all the BIOS settings as per usual. No luck with that routine, since I still got the constant reboots, and the message:
"Building DMI pool .............................................Flash ROM Protected"
So I decided to take another look at what I had done, and wiped out the CMOS settings again, rebooted, and this time on bootup I utilized the "Fail-Safe Defaults," and then went directly into the BIOS flash utility (Q-Flash), via the F8 key. In the Q-Flash, I changed the setting for "retain DMI settings" to disable, and also loaded the default CMOS settings from within Q-Flash. I then exited Q-Flash (F10 key) and shut down. On reboot, I went into the Setup, and set all the BIOS values to their full performance settings (as before), EXCEPT that I changed the value for "Flash ROM Protection" from "Auto" to "Enable."
When I rebooted at 384 x 9 (E6850), with auto voltages, the machine booted right up, with no reboot. After Vista 64 loaded, I shut it down cold, and then started it up again. It started again, went through the POST, no hesitation, and went right into Vista again. This sure looks like the best solution I've seen so far, and this PC is running quite well at 3.45 GHz at auto voltages, and the memory set at 5-5-5-15-2T. If this holds, it will be a miracle.
I've been racking my brain on what might be causing the reboot problem, and I think it has something to do with some DMI values that were being retained in the CMOS, and because I had the "Flash ROM Protection" set to Auto instead of Enable, that allowed those settings to be written to the BIOS during bootup, thus messing up the boot process. Now that's only my humble diagnosis of this recurring plague, but it seems the most logical answer. Many thanks to Mr. Gary for his suggestion about clearing the CMOS, etc., since that got me thinking in the right direction about the other steps that I needed to take.
I hope the foregoing may assist some of the other Forum members (and others) who have had that same type of problem. Take care and have a nice evening. TheBeagle