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Really unusual Boot/Post problem

WTF PC Stuff

So, last week I managed to get ahold of a R7 5800x, and went ahead and snagged it and a Gigabyte B550 AORUS PRO AC.

I tried to boot an older CPU to update the BIOS on got nothing. So I used their Q-Flash feature, and updated to the newest BIOS (f11i).

 

Nothing. No post. So I go about troubleshooting the issue to make sure I don't have a dead part, and it turns out this board will not post with my Power Color Red Devil Radeon RX 5700 xt and my ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 1TB at the same time. Things I've tried to do:
 

  • Three other video cards (1050 ti, 1060 3GB, RX 570) posts and boots to windows.
  • My other NVME posts alone (Inland QLC)
  • All three PCI slots tried, no post
  • Both M.2 Slots tried, no post
  • Returned to original board (B450 Aorus Pro Wifi) works fine, boots to windows
  • Different power supply, no post
  • Two different Corsair memory kits, tries in 1x, 2X and 3X, no post
  • Unplugged all other devices
  • Turned off quick boot and CSM with one of them uninstalled
  • Forced PCI3 Gen 3 and Gen 4 in the BIOS
  • Tried a 1700X and 3600 CPU, no post
  • Tried the F10 BIOS, no post

 

Any time the B550 board, the Red Devil and Adata are all together, no post. Board hangs on the DRAM portion of the boot according to it's troubleshooting LEDs, but I've tried two separate Corsair kits, and every config I've without one of the two parts installed seems to work without issue. Any outside the box ideas would be welcome, as I'm at a loss of what to do with this. The three parts conflicting are all common, and it's just so weird.

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Just now, zhnu said:

So does it post with only the GPU and without nvme?

Yes. Or only the NVME and another GPU.

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14 minutes ago, zhnu said:

Did you clear the BIOS? Sounds like it's a really weird stuff.

Yes. Also tried both newest revisions F10 and F11i for the board.

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1 minute ago, zhnu said:

From what I gathered from the manual your lower slot of nvme is on a diffrent path to the upper slot, so shouldn't be an weird issue of pci-e versioning, maybe reconnect the PSU cables connected to the board? Only thing I can think of is PCI-E lane power.

Tried it. Tried a different PSU, too. 650W installed, also tried a 700W of the same quality.
 

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Just now, zhnu said:

Have you tried to post without any displayport or hdmi connected to the gpu or board.

Yes. Hangs on the same DRAM LED.

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1 minute ago, zhnu said:

Does your bios have and options to manually enable pci-e bifurcation? If so try setting to 8x8x

It does, and I have NOT tried that. Follow up in a bit on that.

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2 hours ago, WTF PC Stuff said:

It does, and I have NOT tried that. Follow up in a bit on that.

 

2 hours ago, zhnu said:

Does your bios have and options to manually enable pci-e bifurcation? If so try setting to 8x8x

No dice. Tried every setting, same result. The 1050 ti I'm using to swap fast will boot, the Red Devil will not.

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4 hours ago, zhnu said:

Take the CPU out and check if the pins are ok, and check also if the cpu socket doesn't have dirt or something in it.

Checked the socket. It would have to be 3 CPU's with the same bad pins. Tried the 5800X, a 3600, and a 1700X, same result.

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Just now, zhnu said:

I'm really confused by this issue, is the "ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro" properly slotted? Like look at the pins to see if they're slightly crooked.

So am I. Yes, it's been reseated numerous times. The best part is if I leave it in and swap the GPU it boots all the way to windows.

 

OR if I remove it, Red Devil posts, and I've been able to install windows 10 on another SSD successfully.

The system will not post on the combination of the ADATA, the Red Devil, or the B550 board. If I change any of these three parts, it can post.

I've numerous systems, and lots of spare parts to use.

I've tried 3 different CPUs, no change. 3 Different memory kits, no change. The parts still boot to the last motherboard used in the system.

Those three parts combined will not post. With a different GPU or motherboard I can boot to windows on the ADATA, with a different NVME installed I was able to install and boot to windows.

I haven't seen an issue like this since the IRQ conflict days.

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2 minutes ago, zhnu said:

Yes it's really very odd I don't know what part to blame here so I would blame the nvme just because it's the cheaper one to replace, I'm sorry I couldn't be of any more help.

Oh, it's fine. I was just hoping I'd stumble upon someone else who found the same issue, or had more intimate knowledge of the BIOS and PCI lanes than I do. I've the replacement NVME in hand, a Sabrent from a black Friday deal. I'm trying that tonight. I'm going to attempt to keep my original windows installation, but we'll see. I just don't want funny business with Windows Activation. 

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I'd suggest using Clonezilla to copy the old NVMe to the new NVMe using device-device with default settings assuming the two are of the same size or the new is larger, shouldn't cause any activation issues as it's not a new install. If the board has two slots you can clone that way, otherwise grab a USB external enclosure or a SATA to NVMe device to stick it in. Both are slower than PCIe to PCIe but it's not a huge slow down, usually takes around 20 minutes to clone a 500GB drive. Sometimes even less.

 

As for the device conflict, that's freakin weird man. It seems like it HAS to be some kind of PCIe 4.0 problem but even turning that down to 3.0 didn't fix it. You've pretty much exhausted all the options other than getting a x16 card to slot the NVMe into.

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40 minutes ago, Bitter said:

I'd suggest using Clonezilla to copy the old NVMe to the new NVMe using device-device with default settings assuming the two are of the same size or the new is larger, shouldn't cause any activation issues as it's not a new install. If the board has two slots you can clone that way, otherwise grab a USB external enclosure or a SATA to NVMe device to stick it in. Both are slower than PCIe to PCIe but it's not a huge slow down, usually takes around 20 minutes to clone a 500GB drive. Sometimes even less.

 

As for the device conflict, that's freakin weird man. It seems like it HAS to be some kind of PCIe 4.0 problem but even turning that down to 3.0 didn't fix it. You've pretty much exhausted all the options other than getting a x16 card to slot the NVMe into.

I'm using Acronis, but that's basically what I'm doing. I'm just ducking activation problems by using the same install, rather than a fresh one. An M.2 to PCIE adapter is about the only thing I don't have, presently. I'll update here when I've copied the ADATA to the Sabrent on the old board and installed it on the new one.

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Still weird but partial sanity regained.

It's something wrong with the windows partition this motherboard/GPU doesn't like. New results:

New NVME posted.
Cloned old NVME (ADATA) to new NVME (Sabrent), no post

Put a third drive NVME (Inland) in with a different working windows partition, and it posts.
Attempting to boot to the old partition and it throws an EFI error.

There's some kind of EFI check being done that's not passing on that partition that the old board could account for. I expect the old board could switch to some kind of legacy mode and the new board's BIOS cannot. Looks like I'll have to wipe and do a clean installation. Alternatively, I might buy a new windows key, start over and move my old NVME to a different build, which was going to happen anyway, it's just there's some nostalgia as that particular key has been upgraded and followed with me for years from an old windows 7 install I did when it was young.

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26 minutes ago, Bitter said:

Oooh!!

 

Try boot-repair!

https://sourceforge.net/p/boot-repair/home/Home/

It may or may not help but it's free and worth a shot. That's super weird still but you're getting closer to solving it.

So, I'm wiping the new NVME drive to do a fresh windows install, because everything on the old board sees the partition as normal.

I'm guessing either new security added or old legacy removed. The card just wants something for the system to boot and the BIOS isn't giving it without a working NVME windows partition, meaning as long as one of the drives has one, the system will boot. Will update with any more weirdness in a bit.

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So, it some weird stuff, some of it just normal stuff I didn't catch (e.g. for about 30 minutes I thought the board wouldn't read any NVME's at all, and the BIOS was just frozen and needed reset. I went ahead and did a full update to F11i, the newest version. As of right now the new Sabrent is working. What I found out was this:

There's definitely something in the partition that's not passing some kind of check, it's written in the GPT, I'm guessing. When I installed windows fresh, it installed as MBR, not GPT, and I'm reluctant to switch it. The first installation of the Radeon/AMD drivers made it really unstable, it got stuck in a reboot loop, I shut it off, went to do something, came back, powered it on, went to do something, then came back to work on it and it had booted and has been working fine since then.

I did some basic stress/bench marking and nothing has cropped up as weird, yet.

Something else I found is that the main data partition for the drive never copied -- when I thought it did, booting on the old board, it instead booted to the old drive, but I didn't know that because it doesn't tell you when it's ignoring your boot option.

 

I went back in to futz with the old drive and found now Acronis is saying there's errors. Windows checked it, no errors found, so I'm at a loss. I'm going to clean it with Disk Part and use it in another build.

Final Verdict is the new build (Beelzebub) is working for now. I'll post pics once he's buttoned up, completely.

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