GA-X58A-UD3R won't boot Windows or Windows DVD strange problem

[les_garten]

I have a GA-X58A-UD3R that has been working fine for about a year with 64 bit W7.  Noticed the other night it was locked up and I power cycled it.

Upon boot it progresses to the "Starting Windows" glowing window and just sits there.  After an hour or so, I restarted it.  It booted up to the boot menu offering the Startup repair option.

I took that and it goes to the same point in the boot process as the OS does.  Gets to the Starting Windows glowing window and just sits there.

Put in a W7 Install CD to see of I could get into it to do a Repair and it does the same thing.

Goes to the "Glowing Window and just pulsates forever.

So now it seems some type of HW issue, I don't have a lot of this type ofHW to swap with so I'm looking for a clear plan of attack since I am running out of stuff to do.

Last thing to try it to pull all the RAM out and put in one stick and try a boot.  After that I'm lost.

I'm perplexed why the DVD won't finish booting and stops at the same place as the OS does in the boot process.

My boot drive is a RAID mirror so don't want to set the BIOS to defaults.

[Aussie Allan]

  First thing to do is post a full spec list so I/we know whats under the hood...

  Any clocking ?

 Noticed anything at all prior to the PC going into a glowing Coma ?

  Good thing is at least it's repeatable  so it's odds on it's hardware .....and good news that the DVD got to the same place which effectively rules out the mirror so the data's safe.... How did it go with just one stick in ?

  Aussie Allan

[les_garten]

Looks ike it needs 2 sticks RAM to run, I pulled out 4 sticks and swapped them around and same thing.  Basically freezes on the WIN 7 Install disc at the glowing window.  Num Lock key frozen, light on.

Has 6 x 2 gig DDR3 OCZ RAM
(2) 1 TB Samsung Dives in a mirror for Boot, RAID Bios says it is normal
(6)  2 TB Sammy Drives in a stripe with Parity, it shows one drive missing and degraded.  One of the drives has the click of death when it starts up.  This is new as well
4870 x2 Radeon Card
HT Omega Halo Sound Card
Blue Ray Burner
1000w Silent Power Cooler master PSU
Lots of Fans in an Antec 900 case
It has a 960 i7 I believe, with monster Thermaltake dual Fan on it.

Never had a bit of problems for over a year.

Is on an APC 1400VA Battery for Power.

With the 12 TB array, I'm not jumping too fast at anything!

The not booting the Install DVD is Pretty telling, it just ain't telling enough.

It it's the board, is there anyway to setup the RAID stripe without losing everything?

I know I have a drive to RMA.

[les_garten]

OK,
   
Got some success starting here.

I pulled all the power to the raid drives for the Stripe drive I use for data.

Booted the Install DVD fine

Then booted into the OS fine.

Then plugged in the power for all the stripe/parity drives except the bad drive and it booted right up.

So the moral to the story is that the Failed rive was somehow not allowing the OS to load on the DVD or from the mirror.

The only story I have to explain that is it was pulling too much power.  You would have thought the PSU would have shut down though if that were the case.

Very strange, never seen this before.

Drive will go back to the mother-ship this week.

Thanx for listening, maybe this thread will help someone else!

[Rolo42]

You beat me to it.

Even when booting from Win disc, it will still poll all storage devices; the bad drive caused it to hang during this process.

Good thing you ran with parity!

[les_garten]

You beat me to it.

Even when booting from Win disc, it will still poll all storage devices; the bad drive caused it to hang during this process.

Good thing you ran with parity!

Yes Indeed!

On the 12 TB, it took up a drive's worth of data for parity, but a smart move in the end.

Hope I don't have a lot of trouble with these Samsung drives.

[Aussie Allan]

  I've had two sets in the last 3 years ,....all Samsung ..... latest ones are all F3s ..... Magic drives for the price ..... write speed over 4 drives in Raid0 will actually out perform a lot of SATAIII drives ..... Ive had zero issues this time round.

  Best part is you can get inside them for firmware updates and still change a few other settings to boot

  Parity is good ..... but back-up regardless

                                 Samsung F3s ..... Recommended by Aussie Allan 

[Dark Mantis]

Just a shame that they are no longer the price they were a month or two back! 1TB for under £40. Just wish I had bought some more then.

[les_garten]

Just a shame that they are no longer the price they were a month or two back! 1TB for under £40. Just wish I had bought some more then.

Yeah, I got a good price on them and bought 6 for my array

They were only slightly more than the 1 TB Root Mirror drives

[Dark Mantis]

Hopefully in a few months time they will be back into full production and the prices will drop again. Only trouble is as time goes by people are swapping to SSDs and they only need to be more spacious and they will really take off.

[Rolo42]

After switching to SSD (+ RST caching), an HDD machine is takes FO-EV-EEEEEER!

heh

What I'm trying to say is that once you use SSD for a few weeks, you are spoiled!

Scuttlebutt says it'll be about a year (since the event) for HDD prices to get back to normal.  IIRC, when memory had the same catastrophe, prices doubled and took about a year to normalise.

[Dark Mantis]

I have SSDs that I use for boot drives but use ordinary magnetic disks for data storage. At the moment this seems to be the best way of using the space compared to price. I use a Revo drive in my main system and that is really fast even comapared to a SSD.

[Aussie Allan]

  
  Agreed DM .... one of the handiest purchases I made that Revo X2 ... it's served me well this last year .... but time to move on shortly.

  Agility 3s have just hit £114 inc and delivery ..... as soon as they hit below 100 ..... 4 of them have my name on them .... These 4  will go into the present editing machine probable on the highPoint 640 ..... could get some very handy numbers with raid0....

  And the revoX2 in the Monster box .... with the speed and stability it's shown me ..... seem a perfect candidate.

 Aussie Allan

  

[Dark Mantis]

I can't wait to see what figures you get on four Agility SSDs in RAID0...should be good! I had noticed that they were coming down in price but not enough yet for me to purchase several of them at once.