Is it me or my board? Help please.

[1fizgig]

Hi folks.

I've just bought my first ever ROG motherboard, with great expectations, but I'm having so many issues that it's starting to get me down, so I'm asking for some help please, before I lose my mind.

I'll give you the run-down on how things have gone from start to the present.

I bought the Rampage IV Formula BF3 from an online reseller in Australia (Mwave), and this was shipped to me and arrived 20/04/2012 a Friday.

To go with this fine board I bought the following:
Intel core i7 3820 CPU
Corsair Vengeance 16GB quad channel memory kit CMZ16GX3M4X1866C9R 1866MHz 4 x 4GB sticks
Gigabyte GTX580UD graphics card
Corsair HX850 PSU
CoolerMaster Hyper 412 slim heatsink/fan
WD 300GB velociraptor 10k sata6GB hdd to use as primary hdd

I also have in my CoolerMaster Sniper case from my old machine (used to be an AMD 3800+ in an Asus PVM board IIRC):
LG GSA-H30N DVD-Ram multi-drive - sata
WD 750GB sata drive Greenpower 7500AACS
2 x Seagate Barracuda 200GB Sata drives which I've had for a while and were working perfectly.


Now here's what happened:

Unpacked gear on the Saturday morning and began doing the install. Ran out of time to finish it and came back to it in the evening. Assembled everything except the extra drives as I wanted to focus on getting Windows 7 Ultimate x64 installed on the boot drive and add the others later.

Once assembled, tried to start the machine: would not even post.
Kept displaying the AF code indicating an Exit Boot Services event according to the manual.
After several go-rounds checking and rechecking with no further progress, did some internet research, and thanks to some info on this site and corresponding info elsewhere, figured i should try updating the BIOS. I even tried resetting CMOS and all individual sticks of ram to try and be as sure as I could with no other parts to swap out.

Decided to update BIOS #1 only to preserve the original in BIOS #2, dutifully downloaded 1305 and proceeded to try and flash using ROG Connect (great innovation BTW).
Once I found a USB key it actually liked and the flash worked, fired up the system - no change.
Saw one of the posts by HiVizMan (I think - don't quote me) referring to the 1202 BIOS.
Downloaded this, flashed BIOS #1, fired up, and voila! Could actually get into the BIOS - things looked good.

Left defaults on the settings, and went about installing Windows. As I hadn't played with AHCI previously, didn't worry too much about any drivers the first time around. Once Windows installed, I put in the motherboard driver disc, and on the drivers page clicked on the AI Install button to let it do everything.

All seemed fine until it installed the Realtek driver (older than Windows' one - do we care?) and rebooted.
When it rebooted, it came up with the 0xc0000225 "couldn't find a device" error.
Nothing had come undone, kinda strange, rebooted, managed to get past the Windows Repair pages, and it booted into the OS. Odd, but ok, let's see how we go. Did some more, including some of the apps, needed a reboot, same thing again.

Decided I'd look at it harder while waiting, figured it can't be an AHCI thing as it was in IDE mode but I could follow a trail to registry settings that would supposedly make AHCI work post install (again references from this site and others to provide an overall picture).
Made the registry changes and BIOS change to AHCI, allowed the boot, nope, just crashed. Reset to IDE mode.

Decided to rebuild in AHCI to make the best of Sata.
Rebooted, set the BIOS, wen through the installer, and it wouldn't let me install on the drive. Loading the drivers didn't matter, it would not install.
Booted with a Hiren's BootCD, removed partitions and updated MBR.
Decided to download the latest RSTe driver from Intel and give this a go, installing in AHCI mode.
Got through to the point of installingand again the installer didn't like the drive, but once the drivers loaded it let me install. Great I thought. Installed, rebooted, issues again, same things.
In short that's been the story so far. I've gone through this several times now, and it's currently got Windows installed but often failing to boot properly, usually getting a BSOD and rebooting, and I skip the Windows Repair and boot Windows normally and get into the OS.

Of note, I noticed my DVD drive started showing up in Explorer as a CDFS music drive - totally wrong of course. I've flashed that drive's firmware to the latest version available (still old) and no change. Yet, like others have had, find that I can insert a data disc and it reads, and can boot from it okay.

I lodged a support email with ASUS via their site, and the weak responses I've received have essentially indicated the support person looking at it doesn't know what to do and has suggested I RMA the board.

I'm hoping that by putting this out there I might get some help from y'all before I go nuts and buy a Gigabyte board or something. I was really looking forward to this system being a flier, and as it's my first ROG board and first opportunity to learn (reasonably safely) about overclocking, am rather disappointed.

Please help save my sanity and bring me back to gaming goodness!

[1fizgig]

I forgot to mention, I'm trying to rule out memory issues by running Memtest 4.20 off a bootable cd.
So far it's gone through to test #8 with no errors over 40 minutes of testing (Std test).

[Retired]

its the board..

[1fizgig]

So Memtest has finished 1 pass with no errors and is currently most of the way through the 2nd pass with no errors.

You may well be right, and I may be in for the pain of an RMA - yet more waiting before I can at last have a working PC again (it's been about 4 months now since I had a decent PC, and I'm doing this stuff on a cruddy old laptop).

[HiVizMan]

What I do when I install an OS for the first time I make sure I do not have any other drives connected. I want to manage where the 100MB OS reserved partition goes.

So what I would do is make sure that the HDD that you want to use as your OS drive is correctly formatted and ready to go party.
Download from Microsoft their Win7 USB tool. And convert your OS to a USB install device - then you do not need a optical drive connected.


Pull all the other hard drives out.

Only have the OS HDD connected, and the USB stick with the OS.

Go into BIOS and F5 to set to defaults

F10 and enter.

When you are past the BIOS screen prompts F8 to select which device to boot from

Select your USB stick.

Install OS.

Once you have done that.

Install the Intel inf chipset drivers and reboot.

Now connect your other HDD.

Let the system find them and install the drivers correctly.

All should work just peachy.

[1fizgig]

HiVizMan wrote:
What I do when I install an OS for the first time I make sure I do not have any other drives connected. I want to manage where the 100MB OS reserved partition goes.

So what I would do is make sure that the HDD that you want to use as your OS drive is correctly formatted and ready to go party.
Download from Microsoft their Win7 USB tool. And convert your OS to a USB install device - then you do not need a optical drive connected.


Pull all the other hard drives out.

Only have the OS HDD connected, and the USB stick with the OS.

Go into BIOS and F5 to set to defaults

F10 and enter.

When you are past the BIOS screen prompts F8 to select which device to boot from

Select your USB stick.

Install OS.

Once you have done that.

Install the Intel inf chipset drivers and reboot.

Now connect your other HDD.

Let the system find them and install the drivers correctly.

All should work just peachy.

Thanks HiVizMan, I appreciate the thoughts, however I have a few questions/comments and a minor update.

The memory tests were 100% clear so this is a good sign.
The 300GB SATA6GB drive WAS the only hard drive connected at all install times.
Are you doing the above install method using AHCI settings for the SATA drives or IDE? You don't mention installing the AHCI drivers during installation so I have to presume you are using IDE?


The other problem which I'm now remembering upon retrying is that the two older SATA 1 Seagate drives are not even detected by the BIOS. It hangs for a while going into the BIOS at the "IDE detect" point according to the A2 code displayed at that time, then finally gets into the BIOS but upon checking the SATA configuration only the 300GB SATA6GB drive is visible.

Further response from the ASUS person looking at my query/responses is to RMA the board with a suspected chipset fault, no referring to an engineer or attempts to make it work.

Do you all think I should go with this, or should we persevere? I intend trying out the above USB install of Windows mainly to eliminate the DVD drive, however this isn't going to be a long-term solution as I know the drive is fine and will need said drive for other installs of course. If Windows7 still misreports the drive, what then?

Thanks.

[Myk_SilentShado]

There are no AHCI drivers to install during Win 7 install, you should be able to just set the drive to AHCI in BIOS and then install Win 7 right after 🙂

Greetz from a fellow Aussie :cool:

[1fizgig]

Myk SilentShadow wrote:
There are no AHCI drivers to install during Win 7 install, you should be able to just set the drive to AHCI in BIOS and then install Win 7 right after 🙂

Greetz from a fellow Aussie :cool:

And salutations! As a Kiwi that has migrated, it's nice to make some contacts here in Oz!

I wonder then why I'd had difficulties and had to use the driver previously? Interestingly, I've set up Win7 using the USB method, and an external USB DVD drive to install the drivers afterwards as suggested.
Windows has of course set up it's own AHCI drivers, which it had done last install also.

I've left out the Intel Rapid Storage Technology enterprise driver software - do I need it? I won't be doing any RAID setup. I thought perhaps it had some AHCI functionality - and then am I missing out on anything?
I've also left out the Realtek Audio driver as Win7 has a more up to date one anyway.

I intend shutting the system down at some point and connecting the SATA DVD drive to see what happens, then the 750GB drive.
I'm almost resigned to the fact that unless there's a firmware update for the Seagate drives they won't make it into the system, but no big deal.

Will keep everyone posted.

[Myk_SilentShado]

As far as I know, Win7 should have the AHCI drivers when you install it...though here's a thought, do you have the standard Win7 or the SP1 edition? that may have updated drivers for AHCI. If you are not planning on setting up RAID, i'd probably do without the IRST software. There will of course be updates through the ASUS website so you can update your realtek drivers etc for your mobo. Oh and a quick question...have you tried using your DVD drive on the ASMedia SATA port? it's the solo one off to the side of the bank of 6 SATA ports, try connecting through there or just check the manufacturer's website and see if there are driver updates for Win7 or at the very least...Vista.

🙂

[1fizgig]

Myk SilentShadow wrote:
As far as I know, Win7 should have the AHCI drivers when you install it...though here's a thought, do you have the standard Win7 or the SP1 edition? that may have updated drivers for AHCI. If you are not planning on setting up RAID, i'd probably do without the IRST software. There will of course be updates through the ASUS website so you can update your realtek drivers etc for your mobo. Oh and a quick question...have you tried using your DVD drive on the ASMedia SATA port? it's the solo one off to the side of the bank of 6 SATA ports, try connecting through there or just check the manufacturer's website and see if there are driver updates for Win7 or at the very least...Vista.

🙂

Win7 does, and did the install with them, both this time and previously. I think the IRTSe tries to update them, and the drivers I downloaded and used on the last setup (pre-USB) did create a new DevMgr entry for storage controllers like it was supposed to. Not sure what the deal is here.
Only using the original Win7 as I haven't got/created an install with SP1 🙂
Have not connected the internal DVD drive to the Asmedia ports - they're 6GB though, yes?
I guess I had been trying to avoid what should be unnecessary DVD-drive drivers, as Win7 never had a problem with this drive previously (old system, no drivers). Is it your experience that drivers have been necessary?