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Busted 4CoreDual-Sata2 (socket 775)

Posted: Mon Nov 16, 2009 7:14 am
by stevenaaus
Hi Guys. Can anyone fill me in on whats happened to my board. It's the AGP/Core2 Asrock 4coredual-sata2. Anyway, It wasn't a bad board , but it started doing instantaneous reboots (both linux and windows) about every hour or two.

So I swapped out the DDR2 for DDR (yes it takes both - Via PT880 chipset),
and the first DDR slot fails to see anything! So all i can do is put a 1 gig stick into slot 2, and it's running fine again - albeit with only one working memory slot.

Can anyone fill me in on what's actually failed. The board's only 11months old, but i can't be bothered sending it away while it's still (half) working.

Oh yeah, I also couldn't install windows onto a sata drive. I think it's a known problem with this board. I had to put a second (IDE) drive in and go into the bios boot menu to switch between Linux/XP. Advice ?

RE: Busted 4CoreDual-Sata2 (socket 775)

Posted: Mon Nov 16, 2009 4:31 pm
by Jim
On my "Giggle Bite", (They bite you on the bag with their crazy bios's, - then sit there giggleing while yiou try to figure things out), board, you cannot fully enable SATA drives unless you are running "Vista". What you have to do is disable "SATA AHCI Mode" and enable "SATA Port 01 Native Mode". If you haven't done anything new to your setup, that may have caused this sudden nutsyness, the only thing I can suggest short of RMAing the board is try a restore from a backup that predated the problem. As you know I have been having my own share of problems with my quadcore machine; (which included the sudden reboot scenario among other things), but I seem to have solved most of it by flashing the bios to the latest version.

That flash incidentally put in a processor ID patch, which indicates that Giggle Bite had the processor info wrong in the bios on my board. VBut if yours was working properly, then suddenly went bad, either your Windopes install has become corrupt, or your board has gone bad, in my opinion.

Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2009 1:53 am
by stevenaaus
Yes, the rebooting problem is definitely hardware, as it occurs in both linux and windows. It just spontaneously started happening, so is probably a mobo failure. I was just curious if anyone could fill me in on what part has failed.

Not being able to boot windows XP from a Sata disk has always been the case. The annoying thing is, a clean Xp installation finds the disk and installs happily, but come boot up it just won't work.

The bios only has a single setting for Sata, namely Sata Raid on/off, so it's not much use either. I've ~heard~ it's a pain to do, but *possible* , but i could never find instructions ~how~.

Posted: Sat Nov 21, 2009 10:47 am
by DonPedro
steven
when you install xp it asks you (very early at the beginning to press F6 (or F5, I am not shure) if you want to (in your case need to) load drivers for your scsi-adapter. it gives you just 2 seconds I guess to hit that key. you need that drivers to be installed because xp looks at your sata-ports and treats them like scsi-ports. so you have to prepare a floppy-disk with the drivers for your sata-chip before you start the installation. once the f-key is hit you will be asked to insert the driver-disk some time later during installation ....

one more edit:
you need the driver package that is labelled to be put on a floppy disk (exactly for the reason to be integrated during an xp-installation), not the driver package you would normally use from within windows. but in most cases the "floppy"-package comes together with the main sata-driver package. unpack (with winrar for example) the sata-driver package and look for a folder or file with the name "floppy" or something with similar meaning ....

Posted: Sat Nov 21, 2009 12:26 pm
by Jim
He is right Steven, my board comes with that too. Unfortunately in the case of "Giggle Bite" the manual clearly states that the full SATA functions only work with Vista.

Posted: Sat Nov 21, 2009 2:52 pm
by stevenaaus
Thanks. XP's installed on a IDE drive now, but if i ever reinstall i'll have a go at putting it on sata with a floppy driver disk. The Sata2 speeds of this board are ok imho. Much better than IDE (and the board is now stable since i've reverted to a single DDR in slot 2), but i'll probably ditch it sometime anyway, because it doesn't support CPU throttling, and although it has a variable bios temperature threshold at which to run the CPU fan slow/fast.. it seems to be ignored, and speeds the fan up too soon.

I do admire ASRock for putting out this board using the (hybrid AGP/PCIe, DDR/DDR2) PT880 chipset, which ~has~ been very solid. But the fact that it failed inside a year doesn't inspire confidence.

Posted: Mon Jan 25, 2010 8:01 pm
by Jim
Steven, I finally found out what has been causing ALL the problems I have been encountering on my quad core machine.. RAM timings is the answer. My RAM is supposed to support 5-5-5, 18, 3, 3, timings. BUT checking that with MemTest 4 Deluxe revealed 57 memory errors on one pass. Back the timings off to 6-5-5, 18, 3, 3 and it runs MemTest error free for 19 hours.

My problems were pretty much the same as yours, so try backing off the latency timing on the first setting.

Posted: Mon Jan 25, 2010 10:54 pm
by stevenaaus
Thanks. Idea sounds good, and is something to remember. When i test it, i'll
report back; but i'm a little busy and I've only got 512meg DDR2
dimms anyway, so 2x512DDR2 isn't much different to 1x1Gb DDR dimm.

Just for completeness... Before i noticed this issue, this machine had
sometimes been dying with a certain app (Xine). I'd just assumed it was the
apps fault, but turns out not to be the case - as it's now perfectly stable - and
that this board has had memory flakes from day 1.

Posted: Fri Jan 29, 2010 6:34 am
by stevenaaus
Put my DDR2 back it to try out the timings.. and the whole
first slot is dead! The remaining DDR2 slot seems to work
fine now. Anyway, i have a PCIe card, and 2gig ddr2, so i might ditch this
board (sometime!) for a better one, and have a real go at overclocking my
E5200, or put in the spare Q9600 i have (but don't care for Quads myself).
:twisted:

Posted: Fri Jan 29, 2010 7:21 am
by Jim
Q9600 - what exactly is that ? Specs please. Might be interested in buying it, if you want to get rid of it.

Posted: Fri Jan 29, 2010 1:38 pm
by stevenaaus
Sorry... Q9400 : 6mb quad core.
They're still worth money for some reason, but slow quad cores aren't very
useful IMHO. It's a hot 95w part, and the 3MB cache per Dual-Core
(the max cache any single thread can use , i think) isn't heaps more than my
E5200's 2MB. I'll hang on to it as it's my only spare socket775 cpu.