I exchanged a number of msgs with George and others just a coupla weeks ago.
The problematic PC has now been back to the vendor and thoroughly
checked/burned etc for about 3 days with NO problems found.
They reckoned the difficulty must have been caused by using Win 98 --- so we
bit the bullet and bought XP, brought the thing home, formatted Again and
Installed the XP monstrosity. Seemed OK :-0
I guess they didn't include a power off over night as part of their
"burn".
Next day booted up and, lo and behold, the dreaded msg is back "Warning, Now
system is in Safe Mode. Please reset overclocking features in Setup Menu"!
But now I see that sometimes it does this and other its just boots as
normal!
How do you turn the system off?... just a Windows Shutdown or do you turn
the power off at the power supply or wall socket?
Methinx somehow we might have to reset something in Setup but don't know why
and how .... Anyone any ideas pls?
There have been several discussions on this at
http://forum.msi.com.tw/ and
various outcomes from abandon in disgust thru hopeful fixes. It seems that
the failure to POST (power on self-test) properly is because some necessary
equipment has not been detected properly at startup and there are different
components involved in peoples' "solutions". Apparently the latest BIOS,
V1.4, has fixed something to do with IDE drive detection but the bottom
line seems to be that the BIOS is trying to detect devices before they have
been fully powered up and the power supply has "settled" following the
initial surge/draw of power on.
What video card do you have and does it need supplementary 12V power from a
drive power connector? One guy claimed that rearranging power connectors,
so that his nVidia 6800 video card supplementary power connector had
nothing else connected to that cable leg from the P/S, fixed the problem.
Another thing is USB and in particular USB keyboards and mice not getting
recognized on power up. One solution here had to do with the case front
panel USB connector: there are 10 pin positions at the mbrd USB connector
socket with one pin, #9, missing; pin 10 is present as USBOC (over current
detect) for the mbrd USB root hub. There are some case front panel USB
connectors which have a connection to this pin 10, possibly to ground, and
this has caused problems with USB devices... whether connected to the case
front panel or not. The solution here is to remove that wire at Pin 10
from the case USB connector, either by cutting the wire, or removing the
metal contact from the connector (tape it off of course) - those pins are
held in the connector by a spring action, either on the metal part or the
plastic of the connector housing. I disconnected it on my Antec case's
connector a few days ago and it seemed to cure a failure to detect my
Logitech joystick, connected to a rear USB port, on cold starts.
I recall you also had a problem with detection of a DVD-ROM drive. It
might help that, and also the general failure to POST, if you change the
drive jumpering: if it's set as Cable Select, change it to the appropriate
Master/Slave, or "single drive" if thats an option and the drive is alone
on the cable... or vice versa.
As for BIOS Setup, it *might* help to disable interfaces which are not in
use, e.g. SATA but it shouldn't really be necessary. Your final resort is
to just tell the vendor you're sick to death of the hassles with this mbrd
and get a new replacement... later version of same model, or a different
model, e.g. a KT8 with similar features.
