- last edited on by
ROGBot
This is one of the weirdest problems I or the techs that built my PC have ever come across, so please bare with me, while I try to explain.
The tower is this:
Aventum III PC
ASUS RAMPAGE V EXTREME 3.1
i7 5960x @ 4.62GHz
32GB Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR4 3000 @ 2,748 MHz
980Ti Asus Strix w/core @ 1,319 MHz and bus @ 2,002 MHz
OS Drive an Intel 400GB 750 PCI-E SSD w/NVMe
2x1TB Samsung 850 Pro SSD in Raid0
2x6TB Seagate SATA3 7200 RPM HDD in Raid0
2x4TB Western Digital 7200 RPM HDD in AHCI
2x2TB Seagate 7200 RPM HDD in AHCI
PSU 1200W Corsair AX1200i
OS Windows 7 Professional
Now here's the problem. On boot, no matter what I do, I get 1-3 BSODs, right after the Windows Splash screen as it tries to go to desktop. It then goes to the black screen with start recovery or start normal. Click start normal and it either finally boots up or repeats the same process 1 or 2 more times. I've gone through Windows Startup repair, ran memtest, ran every diagnostic and test available, went through and reinstalled or updated ALL the hardware drivers, still the same thing. It's not the OC, because once it's it's started, it runs like a monster, I've even ran 4 stress tests simultaneously on it for more than 12 hours and it barely even kisses 80C for split seconds and I even tried it with default clock. What makes this BSOD even more troublesome is the fact that it leaves no event log, no memory dump, literally no sign that it even happens, so I'm assuming it's still in the early part of boot, before Windows is actually fully booted. What I discovered is that if one of the drive slots is pulled out it boots up perfectly fine. Now here's the specifics on that. My tower has 8 slots. The top 4 has 2 pairs of drives in Raid 0 (2 Raids) while the bottom 4 slots are AHCI. It does not matter what kind of drives, what size of drives or which slot, but at least one of the AHCI drives must be pulled out for the BSODs on boot to permanently stop. It can't be cables, because as I said, it doesn't matter which slot and all the different drives I've used have been tested, both with software and on other towers, showing they're perfectly healthy. Along with the fact that once actually booted, the drives work and test fine. The software on the PSU also says everything's fine with the PSU and even the PSU was tested in a similar setup with no problems. I'm being told that I may have to RMA the board, but I would really like to avoid that if possible, because the cooling system on this thing is kind of tedious and I'm not real eager to dismantle this:
So, before I try to RMA the board, does anyone have any ideas as to why it dies when it has 8 hard drives on boot even after I tried just about every fix possible?
The tower is this:
Aventum III PC
ASUS RAMPAGE V EXTREME 3.1
i7 5960x @ 4.62GHz
32GB Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR4 3000 @ 2,748 MHz
980Ti Asus Strix w/core @ 1,319 MHz and bus @ 2,002 MHz
OS Drive an Intel 400GB 750 PCI-E SSD w/NVMe
2x1TB Samsung 850 Pro SSD in Raid0
2x6TB Seagate SATA3 7200 RPM HDD in Raid0
2x4TB Western Digital 7200 RPM HDD in AHCI
2x2TB Seagate 7200 RPM HDD in AHCI
PSU 1200W Corsair AX1200i
OS Windows 7 Professional
Now here's the problem. On boot, no matter what I do, I get 1-3 BSODs, right after the Windows Splash screen as it tries to go to desktop. It then goes to the black screen with start recovery or start normal. Click start normal and it either finally boots up or repeats the same process 1 or 2 more times. I've gone through Windows Startup repair, ran memtest, ran every diagnostic and test available, went through and reinstalled or updated ALL the hardware drivers, still the same thing. It's not the OC, because once it's it's started, it runs like a monster, I've even ran 4 stress tests simultaneously on it for more than 12 hours and it barely even kisses 80C for split seconds and I even tried it with default clock. What makes this BSOD even more troublesome is the fact that it leaves no event log, no memory dump, literally no sign that it even happens, so I'm assuming it's still in the early part of boot, before Windows is actually fully booted. What I discovered is that if one of the drive slots is pulled out it boots up perfectly fine. Now here's the specifics on that. My tower has 8 slots. The top 4 has 2 pairs of drives in Raid 0 (2 Raids) while the bottom 4 slots are AHCI. It does not matter what kind of drives, what size of drives or which slot, but at least one of the AHCI drives must be pulled out for the BSODs on boot to permanently stop. It can't be cables, because as I said, it doesn't matter which slot and all the different drives I've used have been tested, both with software and on other towers, showing they're perfectly healthy. Along with the fact that once actually booted, the drives work and test fine. The software on the PSU also says everything's fine with the PSU and even the PSU was tested in a similar setup with no problems. I'm being told that I may have to RMA the board, but I would really like to avoid that if possible, because the cooling system on this thing is kind of tedious and I'm not real eager to dismantle this:
So, before I try to RMA the board, does anyone have any ideas as to why it dies when it has 8 hard drives on boot even after I tried just about every fix possible?
Black Phoenix wrote:
- If the PC fails to boot...
It doesn't completely fail to boot. It just gives one or a couple BSODs in the same spot, then it finally boots.
BIOS sees everything, once booted everything runs super, it's just to get rid of the BSOD on boot, to give it a clean startup, one of the drives has to be removed.
All the drives are non-hot swappable and hard wired. As for the molex, I have no idea, but with this tower redlined, with EVERYTHING in use, including a CPU stress test running in the background, copies being written to ALL 9 drives from external, a 4K vid playing, multiple browsers open with tabs auto-refreshing, barely gets up into the 600's range of watt use and it's on a 1200 Watt Corsair AX1200i PSU.
That's probably the weirdest thing, once I get passed the retarded BSODs on boot and it's started up, I can beat on this thing with a stick, I've even tried to intentionally crash it and it doesn't even blink. The only thing that I know crashes it, is if I'm encoding and doing a bunch of other stuff and I try rebuilding the index (on about 12 TB of data), not that I care, since Windows indexing sux for databases that big so I use apps like Ultra Search and Everything.
I took the PSU to a PC repair shop, they tested it and said it was perfect.
As for the drivers, yeah, all the latest, I even intentionally removed them individually,, wiped the registry and installed the latest versions clean individually.
I just noticed though that I don't have the latest BIOS, my BIOS is 1801, now they're up to 2001. I think I might try that next.
Also thnx for the PC appreciation.
This is the beast in full glory:
GoNz0- wrote:
Try the modded BIOS as they have updated raid oRoms and have fixed a lot of drive related issues.
Modded BIOS? Which one, where? Are you referring to the new 2001 version that came out recently or something else?
The molex connector I talked about was this one (EZ-Plug):
On the Bottom. It is connected?
When the PC does the BSOD and restarts, did all drives appear in the BIOS or are detected?
About the modded bios, he's talking about this ones - http://www.win-raid.com/t1108f16-Solved-How-to-mod-an-ASUS-Rampage-V-Extreme-BIOS.html - but use it at your own risk.
I have a similar system but only with 2.5" Drives (2x Sandisk X300S 128GB 2.5" RAID0 (OS) + 4x Western Digital Black 750GB 2.5" RAID10 (Storage)) but with the default BIOS from Asus. So I can't really reproduce your problem because mine is OK restarting.
On the Bottom. It is connected?
When the PC does the BSOD and restarts, did all drives appear in the BIOS or are detected?
About the modded bios, he's talking about this ones - http://www.win-raid.com/t1108f16-Solved-How-to-mod-an-ASUS-Rampage-V-Extreme-BIOS.html - but use it at your own risk.
I have a similar system but only with 2.5" Drives (2x Sandisk X300S 128GB 2.5" RAID0 (OS) + 4x Western Digital Black 750GB 2.5" RAID10 (Storage)) but with the default BIOS from Asus. So I can't really reproduce your problem because mine is OK restarting.
