Renzatic on 21/10/2016 at 05:02
Quote Posted by zoog
Have you tried to back up bios? Check if your m/b capable of sometrhing like "dual bios".
I have a dual bios capable mobo, but the GPU won't kick in and turn on the monitor, and even when it did, I couldn't reach the EFI setup menu.
I'm completely dead in the water. All I can do is hit the power button, and listen to the fans spin up.
Quote Posted by zoog
No you can't - it's protected.
I think it depends on how bad the damage is. If it's well and truly dead, you can't even turn them on, you're right. But I've seen PSUs that were merely in a deep level of just functional enough, where it'd power just enough to turn the fans and nothing more, kinda like what I'm experiencing now.
Queue on 22/10/2016 at 01:03
Renz, just a shot in the dark, but pull your RAM and see if it goes to a startup screen.
Renzatic on 22/10/2016 at 01:17
That's what it was, Queue. The 2nd stick apparent just decided to up and go bad on me. Comp works now, and I've got some more ram on the way.
Of course that should've been the first thing I tried. But no. I had it all set in my head it was the PSU. Had to be. I'M NEVER WRONG. I didn't even make an attempt at it until after I had already pulled all the plugs from my power supply out of the mobo, and slotted the new ones in. Big waste of my DAMN TIME, LET ME TELL YOU! :mad:
Renzatic on 22/10/2016 at 01:23
Thanks for the help, everyone! :D
Renzatic on 22/10/2016 at 08:33
...well, spoke too soon. To make sure that everything was kosher, I asked to borrow a few sticks of ram from the same guy who loaned me his PSU. He gives me 3 6GB modules to test and see how everything goes.
Long story short, I plug in all three, and the computer runs for awhile, but it's only detecting 6GB instead 18. That's obviously strange, so I dive into the mobo settings to see if anything's up. Looks normal, save for the fact it's only seeing the memory in bank 0. I turn it back on, play with it a bit, and yeah, it eventually starts acting the way it did the day before. I take out the second module, so I have bank 0 and 2 occupied, and it freezes up during the boot into Windows. Try 0 and 1, same thing. Right now, I only have bank 0 occupied, and it's working fine.
I'm gonna say it's not the ram. I went ahead and cancelled my order. Fortunately, it hadn't shipped out yet.
...but it looks like I'll be ordering a new mobo instead. I think this might be the first time I've had a motherboard go bad on me before.
Renzatic on 22/10/2016 at 09:02
And I just checked out my memory again, and it says it only has 2GB installed.
One thing I can say for certain: something's fuuuhhhhhk'd up.
We're going to pretend for a second that my friend, a college educated, and well trained IT professional, and me, someone who runs around bragging that he generally knows what he's doing, are, in fact, actually pretty fucking stupid.
Damn computer problems got me all discombobulated. :mad:
Renzatic on 22/10/2016 at 10:43
Last post for the night, because I just have to remark on how strange this all is.
As a last ditch effort, I decided to do the whole throw everything at the wall, and see what sticks approach. I figured that the whole boot up sequence is acting all screwy when I have more than one stick of ram in the machine, it's having trouble seeing the ram when I'm able to get into it, and generally it's acting kinda weird.
Well, it looks like a mobo issue, but it could be software, you know? Wonder what would happen if I flashed the firmware? I mean I can't break it any worse than what it already is if it's a hardware problem (yeah, I backed up all my stuff, just in case).
So I did just that. I fired up my mobo tool suite, got the latest EFI image, and went to town.
Here I am, an hour later with both my usual sticks 'o ram in the machine, and it's running fine. Played about half an hour of Dark Souls III as a test, and the only weird thing it did was freeze up for a split second at one point. Ran silky smooth otherwise. I even jumped back and forth from the game to the desktop a few time to see how it'd act. No problems.
I'm going to leave it running overnight to see how it does. Beforehand, it'd freeze up without rhyme or reason, so if it can last 8 or more hours even just sitting on an idle desktop, I'm going to say that progress has been made. I won't say it's fixed just yet, but it's promising.
Now, the questions. For one, if it is, in fact, a firmware issue, why the hell would it up and randomly corrupt itself, effecting seemingly exclusively it's memory controller? Why would it do it so suddenly? I wasn't doing anything when it went bad. I think I had TTLG open up in my browser, without anything else running outside of that. Why would it do it entirely without warning? You'd think something screwy would've gone on beforehand as a precursor to something big going down.
If this is the problem, it's about the most random, entirely out of left field problem I've ever troubleshot before.
Queue on 22/10/2016 at 16:42
It's definitely a hardware issue. If were an older motherboard, I'd be inclined to think that you have a bad solder joint, or joints, somewhere on your RAM bank. But that's really rare with the new boards; not unheard of, but rare.
After you got everything back together, and it was running but did that momentary freeze up, where you running off the original power supply or a new one?
Renzatic on 22/10/2016 at 18:43
The original. I never mounted the test PSU fully into the case.
I won't discount that it could still be some off the way hardware issue, but so far, things seem to be going pretty alright. It's been up 9 hours without issue. It woke up from sleep without a hitch, and hasn't stealth rebooted itself while I've been away from it, since it took me straight to the desktop where Steam and my Dropbox folder are still open, rather than to the login screen when I moved the mouse.
At the moment, it at least seems like it's working.
voodoo47 on 22/10/2016 at 19:35
just make sure all the important stuff is backed up.
