A8N-SLI Deluxe calamity after CPU upgrade

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gdonovan

[H]ard|Gawd
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W.T.H.

Building some systems for the boys to do some classic gaming and have an inexplicable problem.

System is a A8N-SLI Deluxe with a 650GTX and WinXP with a 3500+ CPU, runs like a charm. Or did.

A board member shot me a Opti 175 which installed and booted up with no problem, board has the last BIOS and identified the chip correct.

Booting into windows it blue screened stating the BIOS was not ACPI complaint and should get an updated BIOS (www.hardware-update.com). Entering the BIOS the option to disable was grayed out. So I reinstalled the 3500+, went into the BIOS and disabled ACPI, shut down and swapped the chip back out.

Same thing!

So I swapped the cpu back to 3500+, BIOS set to defaults and rebooted. Same message.

So now I'm thinking the hard drive windows install just got hosed and unhooked the drive and hooked up the drive I made an image of 2 days ago.

Booted up and the same damn message.

Can't get into either drives.

Can't boot into the machine with a boot disc either with hard drive installed or not installed!

ERD Commander just hangs at the "please wait" screen and 2 Linux boot discs lock up as well.

Has anyone ever run across this before? This has to be one of the most bizzare problems I have ever run across.
 
The SATA drive is fine, I loaded it into an external enclosure and everything checks out.

Its almost like the BIOS was hosed by the installation of the Opteron CPU.
 
Going to pop out the batteyr and disconnect the power supply and see if the BIOS defaults back to its native settings. If that doesn't work I'll try to reflash the bios with the same revision.

Edit- Pulling the battery and letting it sit reverts everything back to 2006 date. Booting into Windows you get the same error.

"A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

If this is the first time you have seen this start error screen then restart your computer. If this screen appears again follow these steps; the bios in this system is not fully ACPI compliant. Please contact your system vendor or visit www.hardware-update.com for an updated bios. If you are unable to obtain an updated bios or the latest bios supplied by your vendor it is not ACPI compliant, your can turn off ACPI mode during text mode setup. To do this simply press the F7 key when you are prompted to install storage drivers.The system will not notify you that that F7 key was pressed it will silently disable ACPI and allow you to continue your installation"
 
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I can reflash the board with the last BIOS (1805) but nothing has changed and worse the flash program will NOT let you downgrade to an early BIOS revision. As of this moment I'm out of ideas and the board is dead in the water.
 
Holy cow got a pulse! This board has like 9 lives!

Pulled two sticks of ram and it banged into safe mode, assessing now.
 
gdonovan said:
Holy cow got a pulse! This board has like 9 lives!

Pulled two sticks of ram and it banged into safe mode, assessing now.
Click to expand...

Hmm, did you have all 4 slots occupied? A lot of the s939 boards didn't like all 4 slots filled. Don't know what the exact reason is, but many of them had this issue.
 
stinger608 said:
Hmm, did you have all 4 slots occupied? A lot of the s939 boards didn't like all 4 slots filled. Don't know what the exact reason is, but many of them had this issue.
Click to expand...

All 4 populated but been that way for weeks and rock solid.
 
Ive got an a8n-sli premium / opteron 185 with all 4 ram slots occupied (4gb). Doesn't contribute much. In for updates
 
There is a way to flash back to an older bios. You'll need to run an older flash program. Just keep trying one step older to you find one that will let you flash it. I had a A8n micro board that went bios bonky. This is how I got it straightened out.
 
Currently I'm operating it with 2 sticks of ram (2 gig total) and it has been fine, I'm leaving well enough alone at this point. An XP machine running older games with 2 gig's is fine.
 
Unless I'm getting senile, I recall that my old A8N32-SLI Deluxe would not run 4 slots populated without turning up north bridge voltage. It would POST and make it to the BIOS, but it wouldn't really do jack beyond that until the voltage was pushed up. Something to do with it not having enough juice to push all four sticks on default settings.

I had a similar issue with my 990FX board when I dropped in 16GB. It just didn't want to run stable with 4 sticks until I pushed up the voltage on the Northbridge. I think even Gigabyte's own support people recommended it.
 
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