GA-880GM-UD2H - restart does not work- Solved!

[drewan]

Hello,

My new system has:

GA-880GMA-UD2H v1.4 + latest BIOS
AMD Athlon II X2 260
Crucial 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3 1600
500GB SATA
430W PS

Assembly went quite well as did installation of Windows XP 32-bit SP3. The only problem is that 'restart' does not work. Shutdown and cold powerup works nicely. I also tried a clean install of Ubuntu and 'restart' also fails.

The typical scenario is; bootup the PC (windows or ubuntu), login, choose 'restart', OS shuts down, screen blanks, BIOS boots and beeps once, systems hangs with blank screen.

After power-off and cold power-up, A black/white windows menu says that windows did not shutdown properly, choosing normal windows does bring up windows without problem. Same behaviour with Linux.

I've tried several BIOS adjustments, defaults, CMOS clear but none helped. I also wiped the drive and tried MBR fix with no resolution. I'm wondering if this is a BIOS bug.

This is my second copy of the board - after returning the first one that had the same problem.

Thanks for all suggestions.

[j5]

Sounds disk related.
What are the settings for the SATA?
any usb devices plugged in?
anything in the ROM drive (if you have one)?

[absic]

Hi,

Have you tried the restart option with a clean install of just one of the operating systems? If not, I would try this to see if it is a hardware or dual OS problem.

Before embarking on a clean install though it would be a good idea to clear CMOS and reload Optimised Defaults just to make sure you are starting with the motherboard at default settings.

If you find that using just one of the operating systems allows you to restart properly then it would point to an issue being created when you install the second OS. If you still can't restart properly, post back and we can explore other possible reasons.

[drewan]

j5, absic,

So I looked a bit closer at the disk setup. Both drive and cdrom have a SATA interface where BIOS is set to IDE mode. Other than the mouse/kbd, there are no drives at the USB ports. Safe BIOS defaults were selected prior to assembly and OS install. I've also verified that PSU voltages are within good range.

The windows and linux installs were done on individual drives so the dual-boot mode is not a factor. However, there is an interesting observation in both restart cases;

- windows attempts restart by showing "ntfs.sys missing or corrupt" message
- linux attempts restart by showing grub loading status

Afterwards, the PC hangs and requires a power cycle to recover.

The same behaviour with both OSs suggests that drives are working and boot partitions are accessible. For some reason the CPU just can't follow thru with the OS boot cycle. I'll try tweaking some of the CPU BIOS settings for additoional clues.

[absic]

If you have each OS installed on separate HDD's it might be a good idea to disconnect one of them just to see what happens when you try to reboot.

The issue could be that once POST has completed the BOOT process is confused by which drive it is supposed to be accessing as both drives could be seen at that stage as the primary drive.

[Dark Mantis]

Safe BIOS defaults were selected prior to assembly and OS install.

You shouldn't load Failsafe BIOS Defaults you should be using Optimised BIOS Defaults customised to suit yourself.

Are you sure that you are loading the OSes in the right order ?

[drewan]

Thanks for all the tips. My test configuration is controlled by using only one drive at any time. As suggested, this prevents any boot confusion.

    I had been using the failsafe default and just found that disabling "AMD C1E support" fixes my restart issue!

I'm not too familiar with this feature, but suspect that the low-power operation of the CPU at startup is not properly implemented on this board.

I also found that the user manual shows C1E as disabled by default. In actuality, the failsafe default places C1E into "auto" mode. And since the II X2 supports C1E, the BIOS seems to enable it.

I'll be moving on to using the optimized BIOS setting and possibly a few tweaks to get better performance out of the 260 and 1600 DRAM.

Thank you.

btw, is there any way to edit the topic 'title' - to ammend it with [SOLVED] ?

[absic]

Hi pleased you found the problem and I have amended the title for you. 

[Dark Mantis]

Glad it helped.

[drewan]

Thanks so much.

This was my first experience with Gigabyte and was initially disappointed with its unstable operation. Even with this fix, I'm quite impressed with the quality of the board.

My usual preference has always been ASUS. I had originally purchases (and returned) the M4A88T-M and found the SB heatsink to be under-rated. The backpanel template was flimsy/colorless and the user manual was the worst that I've seen. The BIOS settings seemed less extensive. I don't mean to bad-mouth ASUS, but I am so glad to have settled on the Gigabyte brand.

[Dark Mantis]

I understand where you are coming from as I was on the Asus forum  before here and came over to Gigabyte because I got disillusioned with Asus.