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what is broken?

C

cadmium

n00b
Joined
Aug 7, 2013
Messages
8
Hi all,

I recently ordered a new build and I was trying to finish it up tonight. All seemed great, but then went horribly, horribly down hill.

First parts:
GPU: gtx 780
PSU: SeaSonic G Series SSR-550RM 550W
Mobo: Z87M-G43
CPU: i7 4770k
HDD: Samsung 840 pro 256gb
OS: windows 7 pro

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So, first I booted it up and it posted fine and I thought all was well. I started installing windows and it got to the first reboot in the install process. Then the monitor lost signal and when I went to see what was wrong--and restarted it again--I got the "Please power off and connect pci-e cables to your graphics card."

First I plugged, unplugged and replugged everything and made sure the cables were seated properly--no luck, same problem.

At this point I googled around for the error I got and decided it was probably the graphics card. The psu seems good as it's a gold plus so I figured it was a connection on the gpu.

Then, I took the gpu out and decided to use onboard graphics while I install drivers and a bunch of other stuff. This goes well until I install all of the drivers that came with the mobo. This seemed to break a lot of stuff. In particular, my keyboard isn't usb 3.0 and it stopped working after I installed the usb 3.0 drivers so from then on I had to use that windows on screen keyboard which was hell.

Then I also noticed my disk space was running out. I installed windows on a small 70gb partition following a thread I saw on how big people's windows partitions were. After installing windows I had used up about 66gb (wtf? rly?) and after drivers were installed it was only a couple of gb.

At this point the system was acting a little weird. I was rebooting to install drivers, and then I got my first blue screen of death.

I rebooted again and got it up. I thought maybe windows was having some horrible problems because my disk was out of space so I extended my boot partition to the whole disk.

Then I got another blue screen, and just walked away.

While I was writing this I watched my machine reboot 3 or 4 times and do the same cycle of make it to windows login screen, blue screen, restart, and repeat.

I dunno. Where do I start? I've built quite a few machines before this one and I've never been so confused.



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Edit: Maybe the disk space really was a problem? I just decided to try starting up again and now things seem OK with onboard graphics. I was able to uninstall the offending usb drivers and at least I can use my keyboard again.

Edit: Nope lol still blue screening. Can't get windows update to install anything without blue screening. It's late. I'm going to sleep now.
 
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I recommend reinstalling Windows, but delete the 70GB partition and use the entire SSD.

Before doing that, however, go to the MSI website and download all of the current motherboard drivers (including, possibly, the latest BIOS revision). You should also grab the current version of the Nvidia GPU drivers online.

Oh, and make sure that you've connected your mouse and keyboard onto USB 2.0 ports (ideally, the ones next to the PS/2 port).

After deleting the partition and reinstalling Windows, you should install the key motherboard drivers in the following order: BIOS (use the Windows-based installer) GPU, Intel chipset, LAN/Ethernet, then everything else. Save the USB 3.0 drivers (assuming they're not part of the Intel chipset drivers) last.
 
Seems like something is wacky with your mobo, could be driver related. I'd do like suggested above, flash mobo bios to latest version, download newest drivers from web, and then see how it acts. If it still acts screwy, maybe try a different SDD/HDD in it and see how it acts.
 
It looks like it is stable after reinstalling windows. It ran over night waiting for me to put in my user info (I had gone to bed) without crashing. I guess I'll try getting new drivers from the msi website and see what happens.

P.s. I did the reinstall without the graphic card in--obviously. :p At what point should I try reinstalling the gpu to see if it works? After I install the latest mobo drivers?
 
Moving your page file to another drive as well as turning off hibernation (and deleting the hibernation file via command prompt) will free up a bunch of space on your OS drive.
 
Getting ready to flash bios and I'm unsure about one thing. MSI's website has this instruction:

Download the BIOS that matches your motherboard and version number to your USB device.

My mobo is v1.1 but the newest is v22. Can I flash strait to v22? My whole goal is to update the bios version so it would seem silly if I could only install 1.1?
 
that is the hardware revision number

flash to the latest BIOS for a rev1.1 board
 
So at which stage should I try adding the gpu back in? After upgrading the bios? Should I also install all of the latest drivers too? Should I wait until the graphics card is in before trying to add the drivers for it?
 
After the BIOs Update and the installation of the latest mobo drivers.
 
Build from hell. Well I think everything is OK now, but this was probably my most painful build ever, even considering some of the crazy things that have happened to me while putting machines together (flaming motherboards....)

Anyways in hopes of helping anyone who encounters any of the same issues I did, let me explain what I figured out.

So, in my original post I had 3 distinct issues, and as it turns outnone of which had anything to do with my motherboard.

1) Please connect power cables to your graphics card error:

My power supply was bad... (or maybe just the cables?) I ran out to frys and bought a new psu--a corsair 750ax gold. It wasn't my first choice--a bit beefier than I need, but it was the lowest wattest gold psu in stock at frys so I just took it. It works and the seasonic didn't. Maybe the psu was messed up, maybe it was just the cables, who knows, don't really care anymore.

I like this psu better anyways for 2 reasons: first the fan on it only spins up when it is needed. So far it hasn't turned on at all except at turn on and turn off so I guess it probably won't spin up unless I'm playing games which is great. One less spinning fan at idle. Second, it is fully modular. The seasonic wasn't. The power cables which go to the mobo were not removable. This is OK I guess because you need them to power the mobo, but having them removable too makes installing the psu easier in tight/awkward cases. (More on this later.)

2. Keyboard not working:

I checked the manufacturer's webpage. There is a bug. The intel driver for usb3.0 in windows 7 (not windows 8) does not work with the keyboard. It works fine in ubuntu though. (More on this later.) I installed the driver, and now the keyboard works, but I'm sure I'm missing out on better usb3.0 performance....

3. Random bsods.

This was the ssd+windows. I'm not sure if something is wrong with the ssd, but right now I have ubuntu installed on it and it is running fine. I guess I will try it out during the week and see if anything weird happens. I googled around for this and I couldn't find any information so I have no idea what was wrong. As far as I can tell (I tried updating) the firmware on the ssd is already at the newest version.

Other headaches:

My case wasn't really as well designed as I would have liked. It had enough space not to be cramped, but things were laid out in an awkward way so things ended up cramped with huge chunks of space left over in other parts.

Nothing really works well in windows. I can't believe how badly everything works in windows without drivers. I was using a wireless card, and it didn't work until I installed the drivers that came with it (ubuntu could use it right away), my graphics card had a lot of trouble until I installed the drivers and then it was still having problems so I reinstalled the drivers again and finally it worked (again ubuntu was fine and worked at native res on a 1440p monitor right out of the box). As I mentioned before, I had all sorts of usb 3.0 issues with my keyboard. Once again, it just worked right out of the box in ubuntu. I still have to debug what is going on with my ssd and if it is really working properly with ubuntu, but it looks like it is....

It doesn't help I have a flakey internet connection atm so it was really hard to install drivers and updates on windows.

Oh.. updates! I forgot about that. Windows had so much trouble installing its own updates! I would let it try to install all the updates it wanted to install, it would install 2 and the rest would fail, I would tell it to retry and 2 more would succeed and the rest would fail again and it would detect a bunch more to install. Rinse and repeat 10+ times and now it looks like my system is finally up to date....

I also had a lot of trouble getting windows and ubuntu to play nicely in a dual boot setting. I ended up never figuring out how to get grub to play nicely with both of them, so to install ubuntu after installing windows I just unplugged the sata cable from the hdd that windows is on and let ubuntu install thinking it was the only operating system on the machine. Then it installed fine. Now my "boot loader" is bios itself. I just choose the proper hard drive to boot and either os loads fine.

Anyways, things look decent now so hopefully I'll be ok.
 
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cadmium said:
I also had a lot of trouble getting windows and ubuntu to play nicely in a dual boot setting. I ended up never figuring out how to get grub to play nicely with both of them, so to install ubuntu after installing windows I just unplugged the sata cable from the hdd that windows is on and let ubuntu install thinking it was the only operating system on the machine. Then it installed fine. Now my "boot loader" is bios itself. I just choose the proper hard drive to boot and either os loads fine.

Anyways, things look decent now so hopefully I'll be ok.
Click to expand...

Is this caused by the BIOS, UIFI related? I have a dual boot PC, Win 8 & Ubuntu 12.04 and UIFI bios can cause issues. Of course Windows always gets installed first, followed by Linux. So you can keep the Windows installation if it's working and reinstall the Ubuntu (or better yet, skip the Ubuntu and go with Debian Wheezy :D ).
 
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