Asus TUF X570-plus first boot up destroyed 3 hard drives

[st4rbeast]

I put together a new build Friday (details below), connected some hard drives (1 SSD, 3 HDDS) and booted it up. There was strong burn in/chemical smell but being that it was new hardware I thought nothing of it. The system didn't boot, eventually I reset the CMOS on my motherboard. After that no issues booting and I did a fresh Windows install on SSD.

I could not get the motherboard to recognize my other drives, I figured it was just a BIOS settings issue (I had accessed the other drives on my old motherboard 1 hour prior, after all). Eventually I tried reconnecting the drives to the old motherboard, which is now also unable to recognize them. Then I hooked them up to a usb3 hard drive dock, nothing. Connected to a drive cloner (no pc connection required) same issue, drives will not spin up.

Turns out those 3 drives had there PCBs destroyed on that first startup. The data is still there if I want to pay several hundred to restore it. 1 drive was my main storage, another was a backup to that drive, both are gone. I had another backup in a safe somewhere that was only a few months behind, so there's that.

I have asked a few questions about this issue on reddit and Tom's hardware, the main response I've gotten is 'you should only connect OS for first startup'. And I agree, safety first. BUT just as the installation of seatbelts does not give car permission to have complete brake failure as soon as it drives off the lot, this motherboard should not have destroyed MULTIPLE drives.

What is wrong with this motherboard? Has anyone had a bunch of drives destroyed simultaneosly in this way?

new build
```
ASUS TUF Gaming X570 plus
AMD Ryzen 3900X
OLOY DDR4 32GM RAM 3200MHz (2 Dimms)
EVGA 750 G5 Supernova
Intel SSD 256GB with Windows 10 64 bit
```

old build
```
Asus Z87 Pro
Intel i7 4770K
G.Skills DDR3 16GB 2133MHz (2 Dimms)
Corsair CX750M
```
drives
```
HGST 4TB
Seagate Barracuda 2TB
Seagate Barracuda 1TB
```

[zayajeelo]

I have never heard of such thing. I just finished building my PC last week and believe it or not. The screw driver fell on the motherboard X570 Plus 12 times as I live in apartment with the family and no dam space. I changed my case to full tower Corsair 750D and connected all the wires. Powered up the system and I said to my self for sure I have damaged the motherboard. But thanks God, everything worked fine perfectly. I have one HDD 4TB, 3 Samsungs SDD, and one M.2 Samsung. Checked the settings in the bios everything was there including the case FAN changed the speed and all Rgb Lights and strip light plus the addressable RGB fans were working fine. What is the watt of your power supply? It could be that you have weak power supply and you connected so many things maybe.

My build:
Asus Tuff X570 Plus
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 G3, 220-G3-1000-X1, 80+ GOLD
Ram 16GB: G.SKILL Trident Z RGB DDR4 3600
HDD. Seagate 4TB.
SDD. Samsung 512, 512, 250, M.2 250.
GPU. ASUS ROG STRIX GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER Advanced Overclocked 8G

[st4rbeast]

zayajeelo wrote:
What is the watt of your power supply? It could be that you have weak power supply and you connected so many things maybe.

My power supply is an EVGA 750 gold. I cannot imagine that an under-powered power supply would permanently shock the PCB controllers (maybe it just wouldn't power all devices). And the hard drives aren't high power draw. No issues subsequently powering the cpu and gpu on this system with the same power supply.

[st4rbeast]

As an update, Asus is RMA'ing the board for me, which is little comfort. I had to replace the destroyed drives myself, which cost more than the board. And I have not recovered the data on those drives. It is possible to do a pcb swap on the broken drives, but it requires unsoldering and replacing the ROM chip which I'm not qualified for.

[TheMajekalBum]

I'm running a TUF x570 and haven't heard of or experienced this. Thought I'm only running a 1tb nvme m.2 right now...I do have a 4tb HDD to install soon and I hope it doesn't cook...if it does, Ill report back.

Though I have delt with more than my fair share of data loss. To combat my fear of data loss I have 4 separate/different places I save my files. 1 copy on the main drive, 1 copy on the onboard backup drive(separate from main drive), 1 copy on a portable usb drive, and a copy on my network drive. I also never let any of the copies go beyond 2 days without updating them. I do realize that depending on the amount of data this maybe isn't possible but a minimum of 2 separate copies that cant be affected by the same failure. For your situation Id consider an external drive in addition to the computer drives. Only plug in in for back ups then unplug it, much less can happen when it isn't powered on and being commanded by something.
As far as the drive data...I know some drive manufacturers offer data recovery services for their drives. Maybe try hitting them up and see if they can help you out.

[st4rbeast]

TheMajekalBum wrote:
I'm running a TUF x570 and haven't heard of or experienced this. Thought I'm only running a 1tb nvme m.2 right now...I do have a 4tb HDD to install soon and I hope it doesn't cook...if it does, Ill report back.

My thought is that this was just a first boot up issue as I had to clear the CMOS to get it to post. Maybe that ROM chip was just in a bad state. After clearing it the motherboard has behaved normally, so if you already have the board posting/booting I wouldn't be too concerned about adding drives to it

TheMajekalBum wrote:
For your situation Id consider an external drive in addition to the computer drives. Only plug in in for back ups then unplug it, much less can happen when it isn't powered on and being commanded by something.
As far as the drive data...I know some drive manufacturers offer data recovery services for their drives. Maybe try hitting them up and see if they can help you out.

I had another spare hard drive in a safe that was only a few months out of date, so I didn't lose too much data. I'll probably continue to update that every few months. And I now keep the backup drive in a separate usbc enclosure. Whats really interesting to me is that the SSD was more resilient. I may just try to phase out spinning disks as SSDs continue to get bigger.

[xmanrigger]

st4rbeast wrote:
As an update, Asus is RMA'ing the board for me, which is little comfort. I had to replace the destroyed drives myself, which cost more than the board. And I have not recovered the data on those drives. It is possible to do a pcb swap on the broken drives, but it requires unsoldering and replacing the ROM chip which I'm not qualified for.

I had a drive failure due to a short on the PCB. With the PC being water cooled, a fitting leaked and dripped onto the PCB and shorted it out. Drive is dead.

I have not acquired a new PCB for it yet, but there is still a chance I can retrieve the data. After some research, I found it is possible to get the drive working again.

You must find a PCB from the exact same hard drive and swap them out. EVERY NUMBER SET on both PCBs have to match for this to work. If I remember correctly, there are 3 different number sets that have to match.

Being the King of Procrastination, I havent acted on this yet to confirm. I really should while still a good chance to find the right PCB. This happened back in 2012

[rhempz01]

SAME issue destroyed x4 HDD. It starts making a Noise. I have been builing for 25+ years and this x570 Board destroys HDD. It creates a bad greeert....geeert.....geert sound over and over like there is head damage inside the HDD then th edrive is unregonisable. I am terrified to hook up my new HDD





QUOTE=st4rbeast;800230]I put together a new build Friday (details below), connected some hard drives (1 SSD, 3 HDDS) and booted it up. There was strong burn in/chemical smell but being that it was new hardware I thought nothing of it. The system didn't boot, eventually I reset the CMOS on my motherboard. After that no issues booting and I did a fresh Windows install on SSD.

I could not get the motherboard to recognize my other drives, I figured it was just a BIOS settings issue (I had accessed the other drives on my old motherboard 1 hour prior, after all). Eventually I tried reconnecting the drives to the old motherboard, which is now also unable to recognize them. Then I hooked them up to a usb3 hard drive dock, nothing. Connected to a drive cloner (no pc connection required) same issue, drives will not spin up.

Turns out those 3 drives had there PCBs destroyed on that first startup. The data is still there if I want to pay several hundred to restore it. 1 drive was my main storage, another was a backup to that drive, both are gone. I had another backup in a safe somewhere that was only a few months behind, so there's that.

I have asked a few questions about this issue on reddit and Tom's hardware, the main response I've gotten is 'you should only connect OS for first startup'. And I agree, safety first. BUT just as the installation of seatbelts does not give car permission to have complete brake failure as soon as it drives off the lot, this motherboard should not have destroyed MULTIPLE drives.

What is wrong with this motherboard? Has anyone had a bunch of drives destroyed simultaneosly in this way?

new build
```
ASUS TUF Gaming X570 plus
AMD Ryzen 3900X
OLOY DDR4 32GM RAM 3200MHz (2 Dimms)
EVGA 750 G5 Supernova
Intel SSD 256GB with Windows 10 64 bit
```

old build
```
Asus Z87 Pro
Intel i7 4770K
G.Skills DDR3 16GB 2133MHz (2 Dimms)
Corsair CX750M
```
drives
```
HGST 4TB
Seagate Barracuda 2TB
Seagate Barracuda 1TB
```

[eddhuy]

There is some very good advise on a sticky to this forum: https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?34415-A-few-IMPORTANT-things-to-remember-while-and-after-b...

It does not matter how experienced you are, this is excellent advise to follow.