Black screen, capital accented N and a green block - Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD3P

[Dark Mantis]

Hi again and I hope your mum's ok.
Refresh my memory to save me having to re-read all the past posts,  can you get into the BIOS?

[Cyclocius]

 Yes, I can press the DEL key, then I can press F8 to reach Q-flash, I cannot access the boot menu by pressing F12 as nothing happens.
 The problem is that I cannot see my USB stick in Q-flash, there's a floppy drive A, but it's empty, nothing in there and I get an error trying to access it.

 And thanks, my Mum's fine.

[Dark Mantis]

Look for a setting for USB Storage Function in the BIOS it will probably be under the Integrated Peripherals tab. See if it is set to enabled if not make it so.

[Cyclocius]

 There's no USB storage function setting, there's 1 for USB keyboard and mouse support and they're enabled already.

[Dark Mantis]

There's also one undeneath them called  Legacy USB storage detect(I did get the name slightly wrong) make sure it is enabled because your drive won't show up on boot without it.

[Cyclocius]

 Everything with USB in the title is enabled, still nothing, though the computer did suddenly boot properly upon restarting and forgetting to press del.

[Dark Mantis]

Can you confirm that this setting is enabled? Legacy USB storage detect

[Puterz]

Was this problem ever resolved as I have the exact same problem with a Gigabyte board which does have the latest BIOS.

[Dark Mantis]

Hi and welcome.

Not that I have heard from the OP. The trouble is not everyone reports on how they get on and some just find a fix and dissappear.

[brphrg]

My setup:
2 Kingston ValueRAM KVR800D2N5K2/4G (totalling 8GB, all slots used)
Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD3P BIOS rev F5 (it came that way)
Cooler Master Real Power M520
Intel Postville X25-M SSDSA2MH080G2K5 80GB (connected to Gigabyte SATA, AHCI, using the Gigabyte drivers)

AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition
Gigabyte GV-R477D5-512H-B

2 Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS, 1TB (chipset RAID 1)
Samsung Syncmaster T240
LG GH22NP20 Black

All this stuff is in a (big)tower chassis, 3x80mm fans spinning, running Windows 7 Professial 64 bit

In the little over two years time I have my system, I've seen the exact screen from the OP maybe 4 times.
I also experience system freezes, at a much higher frequency. Maybe once or twice month.
These freezes almost always occur, right after boot, on the login screen. Sometimes I can move the mouse cursor, sometimes I can't.
When I reset the machine using the power button and check the Eventlogs, there is just nothing there.
About a week ago I turned off the write-delay on the SSD boot drive, but haven't had 'luck' with that yet.

I've been blaming Catalyst drivers for all of this crashing and freezing because AMD/ATI cards have had 2D/3D clocking issues.
Until I saw my machine boot up this afternoon, saw the normal POST messages and it displayed the black screen and N with a green block where the Gigabyte SATA ROM should display its startup message. This startup sequence is usually hidden by my TFT's boot time; I'll think I'll keep my CRT around for a while.

Having found this thread, I thought, FINALLY an answer, but alas no(t yet) ...

Rembering the green error message when the GPU doesnt have the PCI-X powerplug inserted, I thought: Isn't this a corrupted display of that message??
So I unplugged the computer, took the 4770 out, disconnected the powercable to the GPU. I checked the power connector on the card, all soldering looked OK.
I put the 4770 back in, reconnected the powercable to the GPU and reseated all my SATA cables. I put power back on, the first boot failed with same screen I opened my case for: A black screen with and N with a green block.

HUH, twice in a row? That's started me looking on Internet again. And then I came here.

What I'll try next (in that order):

• upgrade BIOS to F6
• exchange the SATA cable for my SSD

[brphrg]

Updating the BIOS to F6 bumped the AMD RAID BIOS from 3.0.1540.47 to 3.0.1540.59.
The Gigabyte SATA BIOS is still at 1.06.59

Suspecting the Gigabyte/JMicron adapter (BIOS) is the culprit, I also exchanged the SATA cable that came with the Intel drive with another new one.

Fingers crossed.

And then I saw this as well. I went browsing for a bit looking for a fix for the JMicron BIOS.
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/263748-12-mysterious#t1843508

Apparently the board doesn't like keyboard input during boot..

Hmmm, think I now should suspect my favourite keyboard as well.... It's a 20 year old Olivetti M4 keyboard. 

[brphrg]

Just had another freeze at login, time to swap out the old PS/2 keyboard for a more modern one.

[brphrg]

Haven't touched the systemcase since october, other than the power button. I also de-installed AMD Overdrive (AODSetup3.2.3.0457.exe,  used that only for temperature monitoring). No freezes since. I am still looking for a new keyboard, the physical connection on the PS/2 plug from the Olivetti isn't that great, unlike the keyboard attached to it.  

[Hadius]

I have had this exact issue. The issue appears, then disappears, with little clue as to why.

The first time around, it stopped happening after I removed some extra RAM I had installed. (The RAM had been functioning just fine for a couple of weeks.)

The second time around, several months later, it stopped happening after I unplugged a USB WiFi adapter. (The USB WiFi adapter had been functioning just fine for most of the year.)

None of the factors on their own (BIOS, power adapter, keyboard, RAM, WiFi receiver stick) make any sense to me:

• If my BIOS has a problem, then my computer should not start up correctly. But my BIOS is up to date and 99.3% of the time the computer starts up fine.
• My power adapter is a 700w model, which is 200w higher than the recommended minimum for my Radeon 6850 graphics card.
• My keyboard has been plugged in without disrupting startup. Meanwhile, the few times my computer has done this freezing thing at startup, I wasn't pressing any of the keys.
• Taking out extra RAM the first time this happened seemed to precipitate a fix; but this time, taking out extra RAM made no difference.
• Starting up the computer has worked many times with my WiFi router plugged in.

It must be a combination of things.

The computer froze again a couple of nights ago. I noticed this time around that a Windows update completed itself when finally I got the computer to start up correctly. Perhaps that is one of the factors:

IF there is a Windows update pending completion and IF a peripheral device receives input during startup and IF there is a full moon and IF the computer is positioned more than 30 degrees away from Mecca, you will see a black screen, a capital, accented N (like the second N in the word for boy in Spanish), and a green block.