Trouble entering bios

[WhatTheSchmidt]

I have an Asrock z68 extreme3 gen3 mobo and a crucial m4 ssd. I can use delete or f2 to enter setup but no matter how many times I press it or when it seems like only 10% of the time it actually goes to setup.

I think it's because my bootup time is only 10 seconds? Can I add a break or something dumb like that so I can actually get to the bios to overclock more?

I plugged in my previously raided spinpoint f3 hard drives and luckily without touching the bios the hard drives identified and work fine.

 

[Stupid_Newbie]

I have the sa me issue on my MSI Z86A-G65 (g3). So fast to boot. I cant wait for splash screen, if I hit it early when its black i get in. Im thinking you should make some form of boot USB to have it scan that, and give you more time.

 

[cisco guy]

This subject fascinates me.
Also happens with the ASUS mobo
There is something going on with SSD's, whereas they will be detected sometimes, but not others. Some will only detect on SATA Intel Port 2, not port 1. I would guess Intel port 2 gets juice second after Port 1. Some say it only happens with Sandforce 2281 controller.

PSU have a +5V VSB (Voltage stand by) that must go from "idling" to full on. jonnyguru.com PSU reviews show oscilliscope traces (V vs T) for 5VSB going from fulloff to fullon to fulloff. Some PSU do better than others. I have seen 4.75V and very poor squarewaves.

Whatever it is, the timing is super critical at a certain point of the boot posting process with SSD drives, like tenths of a second.

What we do know:
SSD are instant on/pasive devices - zero delay, while spinner drives are 1-2 seconds to spinup. So SSD actually should be fine with quick bootups, but they arent. Could it be something in the controller firmware?

Fwiw SSD's use 4096KByte address pages - not 512Byte sectors.. There used to be a big hassle with drives not "aligning correctly". Paragon had special alignment tools for this, for people using older partitioning tools that made 32Kb offsets. Anytime one uses Win 7 or Win 7 diskpart, you can be assured you will have a 1024KB initial offset on HDD, which is 1MB unallocated space at start of partition 1. (1024KB = 1024 X 1024 bytes = 1MB)

Wikipedia says the following on Solid State Drives:
"Almost Instantaneous; nothing mechanical to "spin up". May need a few milliseconds to come out of an automatic power-saving mode."
"High performance flash-based SSDs generally require 1/2 to 1/3 the power of HDDs; High performance DRAM SSDs generally require as much power as HDDs and consume power when the rest of the system is shut down"

Things to try:
>Dif PSU - later model
>Intel Port 2 SATAIII
>Does Marvel do same thing in your config?
>Will be really curious to see if X79 ASMedia SATAIII ports are affected?
>NO overclock - stock speed.
>Ram at 1333
>Use Win 7 ONLY to partition/format, no third party softwares. Partition/forma/installt with SSD ONLY installed.
>Enable/disable HPET timer (opposite of what it is now)
>ASRock has lots of strange bios items like HW prefetcher that can be played with
>Use cmd prompt/diskpart to check your O/S SSD drive first partition offset
(type, then hit enter after each)
diskpart
lis dis
sel dis 0 (the SSD)
lis par

(the first line - partition 1 - will tell you offset at far right)

Or you can just use the "how to get" info here
http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/other/157

 

[c1001]

Life is pretty good when your PC boots up too fast!

Maybe you can enable some functions in the BIOS that you currently are not using? That may gain you some time before the OS starts, or introduce an "error" (i.e. RAID array not detected) that will pause the boot up.

 

[WhatTheSchmidt]

Whatever it is, the timing is super critical at a certain point of the boot posting process with SSD drives, like tenths of a second.

^ this has got to be the issue

Although I also had the issue of it bringing up the boot menu instead of going into bios setup and yes I did press delete / F2 in those instances

I'll find something to delay it for now until I figure out my max overclock.