ASRock P67 Pro3 Problems

bobbytables

Hey. My latest build (July '11) which incorporates the ASRock P67 Pro3 (B3 revision) & an Intel i5 2500k, decided to stop booting out of the blue a few days ago.

I have a Crucial M4 64GB SSD as the primary boot disk, which has only ever had the latest Ubuntu distro installed. I virtualized anything else I needed. So for the sake of discussion, Ubuntu is the only OS (no dual boot, nothing else). Over the past few weeks I noticed that the boot sequence would would be randomly delayed during OS loading. POST seemed to complete OK and handover to the OS bootloader seemed grand (in that I powered on the machine and about 20 seconds later I was at my Ubuntu desktop). During some boot sequences this could be double, as it looked like it was waiting for something to initialize, but I didn't take too much notice because with the SSD, the i5 & 8GB of DDR3 my boot times were pretty damn good even with the strange delays compared to my machine prior to July '11.

Then a few days ago, I powered on the machine, please bear in mind the case is closed so I wasn't monitoring the mobo status codes and during the OS loading the monitor just sat there with a little flashing cursor. Again I wasn't exactly expecting a fault.

The SSD wasn't being access beyond this point and nothing was happening. I tried booting several times and this is as far as I got every time. Immediately I thought my SSD had flaked out, so I docked it in an external docking station and could access everything on it fine from another machine. Handy time for a backup I assure you

Then I went in to my BIOS and noticed that portions of the UI looked like it was not rendering properly. So immediately I thought my graphics card must be acting up. So I re-seated the card and it didn't make any difference. I then tested the graphics card in conjunction with my SSD another machine and they both worked perfectly. This also confirmed that my Ubuntu install was fine on the SSD.

In the machine I also had 2 normal SATA disks, one of which had an old bootable Ubuntu distro, which was never used to boot this machine. I tried booting from this, and funnily enough it got to the exact same point during boot before it flaked out on me.

So back I went to the BIOS and set the boot order to USB then SSD and tried starting the machine up from a Live Ubuntu USB. It didn't boot either (same problem). So this time when I restarted the machine I didn't access the BIOS, I pressed another key sequence that let me just specify the boot device (not the boot device order). In this list I could see my SSD, and 2 entries for the single USB device. One entry for the USB started with "UEFI: USB..." and the other "USB: USB...". When I selected the UEFI version, it didn't work, but when I selected the USB version it started up fine. I brought up the Live distro and was able to use the machine. Now I was happy that my RAM & processor were working fine, so at this stage all signs were pointing at something on my ASRock P67 Pro3.

I also tried re-seating everything except the processor and it made no difference (just in case). What I can't understand is that it's not a hardware compatibility issue with Ubuntu, because I have been using this machine every day with a fantastic user experience up until a few days ago. It's rockin fast. I also have not installed anything new recently or changed the boot sequence. The temps I've been monitoring through Ubuntu have never risen beyond 40c for the processor cores or board. I'm not gaming, just coding.

Anyway, I also have an ASUS P8P76 (rev 3.1, with B3), which I'm going to swap in to replace it. In your opinion is this typical of ASRock? Now that I've had a problem with them, people have started telling me their Tesco Value brand-esque boards, compared to ASUS. My last build had an ASUS board and it's been booting with Linux distros without flaw for several years.

Should I learn a lesson from this, or was I just unlucky with a flaky board?

Serephucus

Sounds like you were just unlucky, unfortunately.

I've never used ASRock, but they are basically ASUS boards minus a few bits and pieces, so they are the St. Bernard vs. Dunnes, I suppose you could say.

bobbytables

Cheers Serephucus, I thought so too, but just wanted to run it by others first. I also forgot to say in my last post that I did a CLR CMOS as a last resort, which again made absolutely no difference after it completed.

I won't have time until Saturday/Sunday perhaps to build again with the ASUS P8P67. I am just after noticing though that my RAM: G-Skill 8GBXL Ripjaws X for Intel Sandybridge Platforms DDR3 PC12800 1600MHz 8GB Kit (model ref: F3-12800CL9D-8GBXL) is not listed on the ASUS docs for compatibility. F*ck. I was flicking through the board manual there and I see that there's a MemOK switch on the board that is apparently for addressing RAM compatibility issues, but I'm not fully sure how that could be right. It sort of reminds me of old HP Printers where they had a "if it's broken, press this to fix" button .

Actually the on the G-Skill website, the ASUS board is listed as compatible, so that sounds promising. Funnily enough my current ASRock P67 Pro3 isn't listed as compatible. This could hardly be the problem, surely if RAM wasn't compatible it wouldn't work at all, would it?

Something else worth noting is that my BIOS config is at factory default. I never even overclocked any of the components (yet!) despite owning the 2500k.

bobbytables

So after swapping in the ASUS P8P67 I can confirm that it's not a hardware issue, but rather an issue with the new UEFI BIOS that comes with newer motherboards. I believe my problem has to do with Ubuntu, GRUB & UEFI.

I started a new thread on the Unix board, as I think the issue has more to do with Linux than hardware: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056416027

What is frustrating is that it's not a case of one motherboard and it being incompatible with Linux. UEFI is standard on loads of new motherboards and looks like it will be going forward, replacing legacy BIOS. This is going to be a widespread issue, but I'm sure it's been solved already.

Any takers?