MSI x58 PRO-e will not install Windows

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kevineugenius

[H]ard|Gawd
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Dec 9, 2006
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I bought and put together:
MSI x58 PRO-e
6x2gb Patriot Viper DDR3 10666
i7 920
One Asus 4870 Black Knight 1gb that I already have used for a couple months and added a second one
500gb sata2 HD that I've used for a year-ish and added a 300gb velociraptor

Other parts of the system that I've used for a while previously:
750w Hipro PSU
250w Thermaltake GPU PSU
Samsung DVDRW x2, IDE
Razer sound card
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Windows Vista x64 is installed on the 500gb drive and I left it installed in case something bad happened and I couldn't make the system work, I can always revert to my old setup. The system boots and POSTs just fine (as far as I can tell, the beeps are not really covered in the manual and are unlike any POST beeps I've ever heard). Go into the BIOS, everything is recognized, labelled correctly, yada yada. I disabled onboard sound and boot loader graphic and made it so it would never look at my 500gb drive as a bootable drive, then inserted my Vista DVD and rebooted.

I successfully got into the Vista load menu, put in my key, formatted the 300gb drive and clicked install. Moments later, the system rebooted.

I tried again. This time the system hung. Lights on keyboard and mouse (both USB) go off, hard drive light stops, DVD drive stops reading, and the system just sat there.

I tried again. Instead of booting from the DVD, it put a blinking hyphen in the top left of the screen, the DVD drive spun up furiously, hard drive light started blinking and then nothing happened. It did that for about 20 minutes, then the lights all went off, blank black screen.

I removed the second graphics card and tried again. After putting in the Vista key, the system hung.

I unplugged my 500gb drive and tried again. Vista installation got clear to 21% in the expanding files phase before all the lights went out and it stopped doing anything.

I unplugged the 300gb drive and tried to boot from safe mode on the 500gb drive. The system went through the list of files, then hung.

I set the BIOS to fail-safe defaults and tried booting from the 500gb drive again. System restarted itself.

With the fail-safe defaults loaded, I went in and disabled everything I could find that was not necessary to make the system work, all the power saving features, etc. Didn't help.

So far, the system has hung or rebooted itself at a variety of different places, sometimes not even getting past the MSI DrMOS image screen. I've Google'd around and I'm seeing no help anywhere.

Temperatures on the CPU through this whole thing have been below 30C. It seems like an overheat problem to me, but I don't see how that's possible. For an i7 to hang due to heat, it would have to get over 75C I would think, and after a quick reset button and probably 20 seconds to get back into the BIOS to see the temps, I doubt it would cool all the way down to 24C. The heatsink is never even warm to the touch. GPU and RAM are at least warm, but they're not hot either. The 300gb drive gets hot, but the system hangs w/o that drive even attached so I call that irrelevant.

One weird thing I noticed is a couple times during POST, it said the CPU was running at 21x133 = 2793. 90% of the time it says 20x133 = 2660, which is what it should be. Voltages and RAM timings are all what they ought to be as far as I know, but I'll admit that's something I don't know a lot about.

My diagnosis is that the motherboard has some weird setting in the BIOS somewhere that is either making my RAM run wrong or the CPU run at a speed it's not supposed to run at. Maybe it's messing with voltages for a power feature, I don't know. If not that, the motherboard has to be faulty... right? Any ideas?
 
kevineugenius said:
One weird thing I noticed is a couple times during POST, it said the CPU was running at 21x133 = 2793. 90% of the time it says 20x133 = 2660, which is what it should be. Voltages and RAM timings are all what they ought to be as far as I know, but I'll admit that's something I don't know a lot about.

My diagnosis is that the motherboard has some weird setting in the BIOS somewhere that is either making my RAM run wrong or the CPU run at a speed it's not supposed to run at. Maybe it's messing with voltages for a power feature, I don't know. If not that, the motherboard has to be faulty... right? Any ideas?
Click to expand...
i7 CPUs have a new feature called Turbo Mode which can raise the multiplier on one of the cores to give it a speed boost if the other cores aren't being loaded. That's why you're seeing 21x sometimes instead of 20x. That isn't a problem.

Have you used your Vista install disc to install Windows before? It could be a problem with the installation media. If the disc is fine, try using a different optical drive to install from, in case there's something wrong with your DVD drive.
 
Yes, I've used that disc quite a few times (legally... I just tend to wipe my HDs and start over quite often). I have now also tried a Windows 7 RC disc just in case. I got to the "Starting Windows" screen and there's a red, green, and blue dot above the words. I assume that's the start of an animation that didn't finish playing.
 
kevineugenius said:
Not sure why I didnt try this before, but removing half of the RAM seems to have fixed it.
Click to expand...
That's odd. Have you tried running memtest to see if any of your sticks are bad? If they all check out, try running with all your sticks but set to a lower speed and see if that works.
 
I'm talking with Patriot to see if they want me to run any tests on the RAM or not, I'd rather just send in the three that I took out and have them replace them and go from there. My Vista discs do not have SP1, but the installation that I had on my HD did have SP1.
 
dj_taboo said:
Maybe you need to make some voltage adjustments to run all 6 sticks?
Click to expand...

That's kinda what Patriot says too. There's absolutely nothing in the user's manual about such an adjustment being needed, but I guess I'll have to fiddle with it. I hate playing with voltages etc... never has worked for me yet, I'm not experienced with it and probably not any good with it either.
 
Well dang it. "Supports six unbuffered DIMM of 1.5 Volt DDR3..."

Mine is 1.65v... I didn't even think to check that and I can't send them back to Tigerdirect because I cut out the UPC on one of the boxes for a rebate. So I guess I need to find out what the least expensive motherboard is that will support [email protected]... Should be cheaper than buying 6 RAM chips and I might be able to RMA the mobo.
 
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I'll see what MSI says before doing a BIOS update as I've had some bad luck with those recently. It says on the product page that it won't support 6 DIMMs at 1.65v. I tried it, and it appears to be true. Honestly though, I couldn't get it to run with even 3 at 1.65v. I set all the timings and everything.
 
MSI's customer support is horrid. I'm going to bet he says your power supply isn't compatible with your motherboard.
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Well, I got Vista installed on an Asus P6T with all 6 DIMMs... I thought the nightmare was over. However, I haven't been able to successfully install ANY drivers. They only get to like 2% and the system locks up hard, like super hard. Can't move the mouse cursor at all type hard. Here I go to try try again. Urgh.

second edit: i think i got it now... gor blimey this RAM is persnickety. What happened to the good ol days when RAM was plug and play? Technically it still is I guess, but good grief, this has taken me like 9 days and about 400 grey hairs to get to where I'm confident it's going to function.
 
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I had a similar problem. I would load with only 1 of 3x2 corsair xmws ddr3 1600. after t talking to corsair I found that I had bent some pins on the motherboard try to use artic silver ceramique and swivling the heat sink on the processor to remove air bubbles like the directions say. rma'd the mb and
i7 920 as I wasn't sure if it had been damaged as well. TigerDirect is the bomb. Newegg now sucks in my opinion with free shipping now that they use usps which takes longer and you can;'t track in pkg in real time. I live 30miles from Whitter, CA and use to get sttuff next day if ordered by noon mopst of the time. Now it's several days and I don't when it's coming. Now I get stuff form TigerDirect shiopping is about the same and I don't pay 10% tax. They are as easy as Newegg with rma's so good buy newegg. I received my new MB and i7 in 5 bussiness days. used artic silver paste and now my MD sees all 3 2gb sticks in tri-channel.
PS: your problem may be that crappy HiPro psu that your using. That's like using a reman battery in a Viper. what makes me think that is the only 3rd tier part in both your builds is the psu.
 
glazenuts said:
I had a similar problem. I would load with only 1 of 3x2 corsair xmws ddr3 1600. after t talking to corsair I found that I had bent some pins on the motherboard try to use artic silver ceramique and swivling the heat sink on the processor to remove air bubbles like the directions say. rma'd the mb and
i7 920 as I wasn't sure if it had been damaged as well. TigerDirect is the bomb. Newegg now sucks in my opinion with free shipping now that they use usps which takes longer and you can;'t track in pkg in real time. I live 30miles from Whitter, CA and use to get sttuff next day if ordered by noon mopst of the time. Now it's several days and I don't when it's coming. Now I get stuff form TigerDirect shiopping is about the same and I don't pay 10% tax. They are as easy as Newegg with rma's so good buy newegg. I received my new MB and i7 in 5 bussiness days. used artic silver paste and now my MD sees all 3 2gb sticks in tri-channel.
PS: your problem may be that crappy HiPro psu that your using. That's like using a reman battery in a Viper. what makes me think that is the only 3rd tier part in both your builds is the psu.
Click to expand...

so you damaged your product then returned it? well played.
 
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