P5Q pro boot delay

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I've posted about this before, couldn't fix it and have just been living with it. Just want to see if anyone knows now. I have a P5Q pro, Q6600 and Gskill memory (4GB). When I power the PC on the screen will stay blank and the hard drives will not start up, the wirring noise you get from the CPU fan when you first start up is also delayed.

This delay lasts about a minute, afterwards its all fine, no problems with the PC, never crashs. This is with the PC set at stock. So any ideas?

I have tried -

Booting with no drives connected
Different PSU
Different RAM
Swapping the bios chip itself for one of my mates P5Q pro.
 
I found that on my P5Q if i disable the express gate in bios it did this.
Enabled it again and the extress gate promt comes up for 3 sections then loads windows normally.
 
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Yes, like shadow said that is the fault of expressgate.
The newest bios has a newer version of expressgate that might reduce the delay - overall I don't think it is possible to get rid of the delay completely - but I never saw it last a minute.
 
Its litterly 30 seconds (sorry about the over exaggeration)

Disabling or playing around with expressgate doesn't fix it :(
 
i just recently bought the p5q pro and i dont get this, i do get a message about express gate thing which last about 3 seconds but u can just cancel it by pressing any key. i disabled it in the bios
 
Ok i had this problem with long boot times, i disabled express gate and then choose boot from dvd drive as 1st option for booting and now it loads 3 secs or so looking for dvd drive then boots to windows 7 in under 15 secs!
Not the most technical answer i know but worked for me.
 
Hi Cyborg

I know this was a while ago for you but......

I have bought a P5q Pro Turbo with an E8400 CPU, 4 x 1Gb Kingmax 1066 ram and an HIS ATI Radeon 4850 1gb, 750W power supply, 350 SATA Seagate HD and a Sony Optiarc Sata DVD writer.

I have EXACTLY the same problem.
Switch the PC on, the fans start up.
Wait 30 seconds, the fans speed up, the pc beeps, power light comes on and then it boots as per normal.

What did you do to solve the problem?
 
I never did solve the issue mate. I still put up with it even now. Believe it or not I work as a PC tech and still havn't fixed it.
 
With Express Gate disabled, I still get a delay of maybe 10 - 15 secs displaying "searching for hard drives".
Any ideas?

I think I had this when I first got my P5Q-E. If I remember right it was something to do with the Marvell IDE option in the BIOS. Its under Advanced>Onboard Devices Configuration>Marvell IDE, set that to disabled. See what happens, I don't think you need it enabled unless you've got an IDE drive.
 
I feel your pain Cyborg. I'm no noob when it comes to hardware [I'm no OC expert though] so this is really frustrating.
I will keep trying but it's damn annoying, especially when you ARE trying to overclock. You never know if the PC is going to post or not.

I will have a look at the IDE controller issue, but I'm pretty sure I've disabled all unused options. Besides, this is BEFORE the post, so the bios options will have no effect at all. I'm thinking its a fan speed sensor, faulty ram or ram incompatibility, or PSU incompatibility.

The PSU is a new no-name 750W job from ****, so it could also be this, but I have had decent over clocks from cheaper lower rated power supplies so I don't think so.

Anyway, I've bought some decent ram, Corsair Dominator, so I'll see how it goes. They arrive tomorrow so I'll keep you posted.

Oh yes, and the board is running the latest manufacturers BIOS. If the RAM doesnt solved the issue, I may just try out a tweaked BIOS.
 
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There are tweaked BIOS for the P5Q Pro that enhance memory compatibility, so if the dominator doesn't sort it out I can point you in the right direction.
 
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