P5GD2 Deluxe - Help!

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someone

Just got this MB from Newegg, and had quite a few headaches this
weekend.

The physical install was a breeze; everything fit in the Thermaltake
case and the Enermax Noisetaker 470 plugged in with more than enough
juice to supply the board. I installed the recently released EX800XT
video card in the PCI x16 slot, my SCSI card in the PCI slot, and 2
Maxtor SATA drives. Booted the computer up, set up the bios values as
best I could (I know a majority of the settings, but some of them I
had never heard of so I left them at "auto").

Set up both maxtors in RAID 0/1 configuration using the Intel matrix
format-- no sweat. Rebooted with the WinXP install CD in the drive
and the ICH6 drivers on a floppy, and the install went well, until it
hit the "inspecting components" part of the install, at which point
the computer froze.

Rebooted and restarted-- same problem. This was with my WinXP install
slipstreamed with SP2, so I thought it might be some strangeness
there. Tried to reinstall with the regular XP install disc, and it
didn't hang at that point, but never got further. After five minutes
of no activity, I rebooted the machine and considered my options.

I went to the ASUS website and downloaded the new bios, thinking that
would solve some sort of odd incompatibility. When I went to install
it, I tried using both the Alt-F2 POST method (and it found the bios,
said it was reading it, then rechecked the floppy, found the bios,
read it... endless loop) then tried with the ASUS DOS utility, which
didn't work either.

I noticed as I was rebooting that the computer would take a longish
time to soft-reset... possibly 20 seconds from hitting the reset
button to it finally coming back up. When I plugged my speakers into
the onboard soundcard, it would always say before rebooting "System
reboot due to bad overclock" or something like that -- quite odd,
since I wasn't overclocking the system at all and had everything on
normal settings.

At this point, I went back into the bios and turned everything to
standard, thinking that the "auto" settings might be doing some odd
behavior. I rebooted the system again, went into the WinXP install,
and again it just kept querying the components ad infinitum without
progressing. Seeing that it was 4am, I decided to let it run for what
little overnight there still was, and inspect it in the morning.

Well, this morning I was greeted with the bluescreen of death. A
windows error reported that the system had automatically shutdown to
prevent damage to the unit, and had done a physical memory dump.

Crap, I thought. Back at square one. So I went ahead and hit the
reset button, and then...

nothing.

My computer is completely dead. When I power the system up, the
speakers make a little crackle that sounds like the sound system is
coming alive... the hard drives spin up... and the graphics card
lights up and the fan spins, but the computer will not POST at all,
even though the internal LED is glowing green. It doesn't have any
warning messages or anything, and now I'm totally frustrated at having
this thing fail so completely during the install.

Any ideas at all out there, friends? I could use suggestions. At
this point, I'm just assuming that I got the unfortunate pick of a bad
MB, and it's a question of sending it back for a working replacement.

Thanks so much in advance....
 
And here's are two followup questions...

Does anyone have a manual that accurately reflects the MB itself?
Mine indicates that there are two locations for the USB wakeup
settings, but I can only find one, and there is no section for the
proper connections to the external firewire port. Did Asus forget to
include some settings?

Finally-- where can you get a decent explanation for all the CMOS
settings, rather than the Asus manual's description of "This will set
X to enabled or disabled." Yeah... what does that X term mean?

Thanks again all...
 
First thing would be to see if you can get some beeps out of it.

So pull everything (including graphics, memory, cpu) out and do the
amplified speaker in the lime audio socket trick. (I take it the board has
the voice reporter feature?).

If you can get somewhere, then may be put the graphics back in to see if it
will start to post.

Add a floppy drive and try memtest86.

Add a disc drive... but keep it stripped it to minimum and try a simple.

IE no SCSI, no RAID, only 1 disc, everything else out or disabled...

Oh and heaps of moral support from over here.

- Tim
 
Great ideas... thanks. I'm hopeful this thing is recoverable. What a
headache to take it all apart again just to send that back...

And the support is appreciated too... need all the karma I can get!
 
No luck.

I pulled everything out and rebooted. The soundcard said, "No CPU
detected" and "CPU Fault" repeatedly. I reinstalled the CPU and
rebooted. "Ram Error" was the reply. I installed the RAM, and it was
quiet, but didn't boot. I rebooted the computer and the voice said
"System Shutdown due to bad CPU overclocking" or something like that.

At this point, I'm going to exchange the MB and the RAM. I got
Kingston valueram, which seems very good, but I've read elsewhere that
the motherboard is very finicky, so I'm opting to replace it with
Corsair XMS2 PC2-5400 sticks to see if I don't have better luck with
those.

I'm hoping it isn't actually the CPU... but darned if I can figure out
why it's coming up with a CPU overclock error when the bios wasn't
even set to overclock anything to begin with (and, with a locked CPU
to boot...)

Has anyone had any luck with this (or a similar ASUS P5 motherboard)
and Corsair's Ram?

Thanks all, and thanks for the idea, Tim.
 
Well, thats all good news. CPU works, RAM detected.

If yo ar going to persist, then clear cmos. If it allows you into the bios,
then load defaults on the first page. If you still get instability then
check memory timings and perhaps slow them right down.

Unfortunately these boards are new, I don't have one, and you are currently
"The Knowldege base". Have you double checked the memory specs on the asus
site vs the ram you have purchased?

It may just be the memory, who knows.

- Tim
 
Sounds like your attempted BIOS upgrade failed. Time for a new motherboard,
I'm afraid.
 
Well, I did try and clear the cmos... twice. No dice. I finally
packed it all up when it failed to post successfully; in the past, it
would give the cpu overclock error, but at least allow me to get into
the cmos to try and change the values. Now, it's not even getting
that far.

No ideas...
 
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