Looking for some assistance on a crazy issue...

M

MeatballCB

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 8, 2008
Messages
124
Alright, I've been banging my head against the wall on this issue for the last week or so and can't for the life of me figure out what the issue is. About a month ago I decided to upgrade my aging i7-860 system and move up to something newer, so I built a new machine with the following specs.

  • Mobo: Biostar TZ77XE3
  • CPU: Intel i5-3570K
  • Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus
  • Memory: 16 GB (4 x 4 GB) G.SKILL Ripjaws, 4 x 4GB DDR3 1333 (F3-10666CL9D-8GBRL)
  • HD-OS: 256 GB Samsung 830 (MZ-7PC256B/WW)
  • HD-Storage: 1 TB Seagate Barracuda (ST31000528AS)
  • DVD/CD: LG GH22NS70 DVD-RW
  • GPU: Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 OC 3 GB
  • PSU: Corsair HX850
  • Case: Rosewill Thor v2
  • OS: Windows 8 Pro x64

Everything had the lastest drivers/patches/bios/firmware and nothing was overclocked. I started noticing that occasionally on reboots the post/boot process would hang with an error code of "9C" in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. I contacted Biostar and after going back and forth with them a bit, they thought it might have been a Mobo issue and offered me an RMA. So, in the meantime, I tried another board and swapped the memory.

  • Mobo 2: MSI Z77A-GD55
  • Memory 2: 32 GB (4 x 8 GB) G.SKill Ripjaws X Series DDR3 1600 (F3-12800CL10D-16GBXL)

This time I saw the same thing, but was getting the error code "CA" in the bottom right hand corner. I was able to pin down that this was only happening when I would boot into windows, log in, and then do a restart. If I did that, 75% of the time, the post would hang with the error message. I ran Memtest86+ for over 12 hours and found no memory issues. Talking to MSI, they believed it was either a CPU or Motherboard issue. I returned the motherboard and moved onto round 3 and swapped out just about everything.

  • Mobo 3: ASRock Z77 Extreme 4
  • CPU 2: Intel i7-3770K
  • Memory 2: 4 GB (2 x 2 GB) G.Skill DDR31333 (F3-10666CL8D-4GBHK)
  • HD-OS 2: 60 GB OCZ Agility 3 SSD (AGT3-25SAT3-60G)
  • HD-Storage 2: 2 TB Western Digital WD20EARX
  • CD/DVD 2: LiteOn iHas124
  • GPU 2: MSI Geforce GTX 670 2 GB (N670GTX-PM2D2GD5/OC)

The only thing I have not changed is the PSU, the case and the 2 DVI connected ASUS LCD's. I disconnected all my USB peripherals except for a mouse/keyboard. Once again, if I logged into Windows and did a restart, most of the time the post would stop, this time with a "99" error code. At this point I'm at a loss as to what could be causing it. I'm going to try swapping out the PSU next, but I'm wondering if this is just some sort of bug in Windows 8 Pro x64. If that doesn't work, I'm probably going to drop back to Windows 7 and see if I get the same problem.

Has anyone seen anything like this or does anyone have any idea what could be causing these issues?
 
Yeah, did a partition wipe and fresh install each time I swapped the motherboard. Just as some additional info, I've tried a ton of other setups to see if there was any conflicts like booting with only the Samsung or OCZ SSD's attached, or a single stick of RAM (rotating through all the sticks) and still ran into the same issues.
 
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Pretty sure that it's not the CPU, as I tested both a 3570K and a 3770K and saw the same problems. As a matter of fact, at this point I'm almost positive it's not a hardware error at all and it's a problem with Windows 8. I've wiped the SSD and reinstalled Windows 7 pro. Done about 40 reboots/restarts and not one post hang/error message. Just for grins, I ran that Intel CPU tester, and everything passed on the 3770K.

My completely uneducated guess is that there's a bug or something in Win 8 Pro x64 that is not gracefully handling hardware shutdown for one of the components or power modes when doing a restart, so the BIOS/UEFI is kicking an error.
 
Well, sonofacrap. I just did one final reboot before I was about to call it a night and of course. POST stop, with error message "99". Gah!

The last things I did before I rebooted was download/install about 7 .NET Framework 4 patches and did an update on my browser (PaleMoon x64).
 
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