Weird power-on / bios corruption issue

Hiya,

About 6 months ago I built this machine. I've added a 1TB HDD since then, and removed the wireless card, but no other changes have been made. It's been running with a mild overclock - 4Ghz on the CPU, and 1050/1450 on the GPU.

It's been fine up until about a month ago, when it occasionally stopped waking from sleep. Then it started to only power on maybe every third attempt. I lived with it like that for a few weeks, but then it took me an age to power it on one day (it'd start up the fans for a second, then go dead, wait 10 seconds and repeat the process), and when I did finally get it started I got a message saying the BIOS was corrupt and that it was restoring from the backup BIOS.

I tried starting it via shorting the motherboard pins for the case switch in case there was something wrong with the case switch itself, but that made no difference to things, so I suspect it isn't the switch itself.

I've also tried it without graphics card, hdd, dvd i.e. just the ssd connected. It makes no difference to the behaviour.

Anyway, I replaced the BIOS battery on the motherboard as a first quick fix, and I thought that had fixed the problem as it behaved itself for a couple of days, but over the last week it has been struggling to power on again. When I finally did get it to power on this evening (many attempts of switching the power supply off, holding the power on button on and switching the power supply on) the BIOS was corrupt yet again.

Unfortunately, I don't have any spares lying around, or anyone close by with spares I could borrow, so I think I'm going to have to RMA something or other. Question is, what? I'm guessing it's the m/b at fault, but that is just a guess.

If I leave it running, it's fine. It just carries on working. I only get these issues after a power-down. This suggests that the PSU and CPU are OK, right? I've been encoding DVDs this evening without issue, so the machine is not just idling...

Anyone have any thoughts, opinions, or similar experiences?

Would it be worth stripping the machine and rebuilding it to see if that makes any difference? I don't think it will, but I'm not sure what else to try at this stage...

Thanks.
Mark

Sounds like a dud mobo to me, but i would at least check the 20+4 and 2x4pin power connectors are firmly home and popping out and reseating ram cures more faults than i care to mention

Update the BIOS?

I upgraded the BIOS to the latest when this started happening. It is now v F5. Will check if there is a newer one though.

Edit: looks like the BIOS restored back to the original version?!? I had upgraded to F15. Will give 16 a try now.

Now the pc/screen won't wake from power save so I have had to restart it twice and the second time it failed to see the ssd on startup - not listed as a boot device. So I boot the win 7 DVD and repair the boot partition, and now it booted OK from the ssd.

I have already reseated the ram and unplugged/replugged the power to the mb. Will give that another go now though. Just refreshing my backups while the thing is still running, and creating a sys image on a spare drive.

Cheers for the comments.

Well, I've now tried:

- upgrading BIOS to F16
- removing gfx card, and
- disconnecting all drives (power and sata)
- reconnecting all power cables to m/b
- reseating RAM, booting with 0,1,2 DIMMs
- booting from a Linux distro on USB

And whatever I do, it still only boots one time in 10 or 12 attempts. It's just completely dead the other times. At least the BIOS hasn't corrupted again since yesterday...

I suspect I'm going to have to RMA the motherboard, unless anyone else has any suggestions?

(I suppose the other option is to just never reboot it again!)

Have you tried a different data or power cable on the ssd? You could have a dodgy cable. Also try another 6gb port.

Idleman said:

Have you tried a different data or power cable on the ssd? You could have a dodgy cable. Also try another 6gb port.

Click to expand...

Just tried that, and it didn't help. The issue is appearing whether or not I have the drives plugged in, so I didn't think it'll make any difference. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

Hmm... so I've stripped the machine, and ran the board by itself outside of the case with just the cpu cooler. Still no joy - boots maybe one in 20 times when shorting the on/off pins. I even tried a different CPU fan in case that was acting dodgy and stopping it booting.

Ah well, time to send the motherboard off and see what's what with it.

If you have changed the PSU and the problem still remained then RMA your MB is good solution

GIGA-Man said:

If you have changed the PSU and the problem still remained then RMA your MB is good solution

Click to expand...

He doesn't mention trying a different PSU.

I would be tempted to try a different PSU if possible. It could be that it's not powering the board properly and after a few "attempts" it corrupts the BIOS.

Well, I RMA'd the board, but OCUK returned it stating that it had a bent CPU socket pin, and so the warranty was void. It was also about 5 days over the 6 month cutoff.

Inspecting the board when it came back, there was indeed a pin bent almost completely under another pin. It was 2 pins in and 2 pins down from the right hand side outer edge where the little square of plastic is in the middle of the socket (I hope that makes sense).

I *know* that I did not bend this pin when disassembling the PC over the weekend - nothing touched the socket except cpu coming out and cover going in, so the pin was either bent when I received the board, or I bent it when originally assembling the PC. Either way, it's been running for 5 months without issue, with a bent pin failing to connect to the cpu, and then it started exhibiting this odd power on failure, which has slowly got worse (as described above).

Anyway, I manually unbent the pin with a magnifying glass and needle, and got it pretty much back to how it should be - luckily it was just the one pin.

In hindsight, I should have really checked that before returning the board. Oh well. I then reassembled the PC (on first startup it restarted itself and restored the BIOS yet again) and for about 30 hours it worked fine - shutdown, power-on without issue (I did it about 8 times on the first evening to make sure, then again next morning and night). Then, this morning the PC again failed to power on. I only managed to get it started by powering off the PSU, waiting a while, and powering back on. It restarted first attempt after having the PSU off for ~30 seconds. The BIOS has remained fine this time though, since that initial restore. No more corruptions yet.

At this stage, I'm just going to leave the damn thing running 24x7, although that's not really a long term solution to the issue.

I suppose I could buy another board to confirm that there is a problem with this one (and just return it if it has the same issues, so it'll just cost me shipping), but given that this board is now out of warranty due to damage I'm not sure what I'd be able to do with it if a second board does show that there's a problem with this one.

Do I approach Gigabyte directly and see if they'd be willing to test it for me, or do I bin it and write off the ~£100 for another one? Giga-man, any comments on this?

I'll try and track down another PSU from somewhere and try that, but the machine runs fine under load (including when the GPU is drawing power) and I wouldn't expect a PSU of this quality to start showing issues after only 5 months of use...

Other than a work Thinkpad, this is my only machine at the moment, so having it not working is pretty irritating.

Looks like bignev72 was right.... I've managed to get hold of a spare PSU, and using it everything works fine.

So, it looks like the m/b was a red herring and the PSU is at fault here (or possibly the main cables for m/b power - I don't have any spare modular cables so I can't test those).

Time to RMA the PSU, methinks, along with the modular cables it came with.