Random (sometimes very long) POST times

Soldato
Joined
16 Jan 2006
Posts
3,051
Hi.

Built my dad a rig a few weeks ago with a gigabyte ga p55a ud3 board.

Everything's great apart from initial POST.

A cold boot took nearly 20 seconds to report the memory last night.

Sometimes it flies through the memory check, others take a good few seconds.

Should I update his BIOS or is there an underlying memory problem here?

Cheers.
 
Is the memory set on XMS or SPD profile?

Is the voltage stock, check on sticker for correct volts. Change from auto in bios to correct volts.

andy
 
Might be as simple as reseating your memory sticks.

Out of interest when you have the long boot time are there any USB ports that are populated. It could be as simple as a keyboard that the mobo is having problems picking up or a conflict with another USB device that the mobo wants to make into a legacy device.

Sometimes you will find that if there is a USB device connected it is possible that the device impacts on the whole process negativity. Have seen that a few times now that USB powered devices are more common. For example I had a MP3 player that if connected when I reset or reboot the whole process would hang for nearly a minute before continuing to the OS log in screen.
 
Might be as simple as reseating your memory sticks.

Out of interest when you have the long boot time are there any USB ports that are populated. It could be as simple as a keyboard that the mobo is having problems picking up or a conflict with another USB device that the mobo wants to make into a legacy device.

Sometimes you will find that if there is a USB device connected it is possible that the device impacts on the whole process negativity. Have seen that a few times now that USB powered devices are more common. For example I had a MP3 player that if connected when I reset or reboot the whole process would hang for nearly a minute before continuing to the OS log in screen.

Yeah, I have an external hd that does this. Adds around 10-20 seconds to the post time, and maybe a minute to the boot time.
 
Now that you mention it my WD passport does that with the upstairs machine.

Mines a WD too.... a mybook. It's only with this drive... I have another one which is made from a samsung 5400rpm + external caddy which doesn't cause this problem, it's just the WD.

Plug it into my POS laptop, and it takes around 10 minutes to boot into windows.
 
I had a similar slow post issue on an asus p5w dh deluxe board, it would hang when detecting usb devices.

Removing all usb devices didn't work for me unfortunately but after a long long time a new bios release fixed the issue.

It only seemed to happen on a cold boot, not reboots etc.
 
Well it's July 2011 and the problem is still there!

I can only ever mess with the computer when I'm at my parents' so I don't get much chance to try and sort it.

However, after a BIOS update, running Memtest and trying every possible BIOS setting from default, to optimised as well as overclocked to get the RAM at 1600mhz, I can safely say I'm stumped. It happens with one memory stick too.

The annoying thing is that the machine absolutely tears through POST if it's been on a while and then you shut it down then start it up.

Leave it 15 minutes though and it takes a bare minimum of 30 seconds to get from listing the motherboard model number to showing the RAM speed and size.

I have no other hardware that I can test with so I'm kind of at a dead end.

All the components were bought from OC and are now over a year old.

Does anyone have any further ideas?

Thanks a lot.
 
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