Need help w/ 975XBX2 (something I'm missing I guess).

[Damn Dirty Ape]

Ok

I have the XBX2 with the latest and greatest bios. I have a WDC 500GB SATA drive and a Samsung DVD-/+ R SATA drive. Onboard sound, Vista Ultimate, 2gb of mushkin ram, e6600, evga 8800gts 640mb.

Nothing is overclocked, temps are all nice and cool.

I have a problem with this setup that I cannot for the life of me ferret out. It never fails, I leave the house, go to bed , etc, I come back to the monitor reading:

"no boot device available, press any key to retry"

The HDD light is on steady. Pressing any key does no good.

Firstly, WHY am I rebooting when it is unattended? (memory checks out good, and I have disabled any kind of sleep functions), I have done multiple installs of Vista at this point. All the drivers used are from the intel site (latest). Secondly, WHY is it insisting there is no boot device available? I have the boot sequence set as CD/DVD then the HDD. No disc in the drive.

I'm ready to put it in the industrial strength shredder at work and laugh as it goes down.

[vddobrev]

What are your Power Settings? Do you have your PC to automatically sleep after a certain time? The reason for rebooting could be it tried to enter sleep mode, but it failed, and it is trying to reboot.
I am not sure why it will not detect the boot drive. Does it boot normally otherwise? Are your HDD and CD/DVD connected to the black SATA ports?
I read something somewhere about SATA CD/DVD, search for this...

[kenc51]

What are your temps like when your in windows?
Also, what PSU are you running?

[Damn Dirty Ape]

Using a NEOHE 550 Antec power supply, DVD drive is on SATA 1, WDC 500gb is on SATA 0. Power profile is high performance, any type of sleep is disabled, hibernate included. Only the screen blanks after 30 minutes I think it is.

No problems during daily use whatsoever. If I do a restart or cold boot it never has a problem.

Only when I'm not around do I come back to a black screen with the boot issue displayed.

[BlueMagic]

What happens if you change the boot sequence to HDD first , then the Samsung DVD drive ?

[Damn Dirty Ape]

I"ve not tried removing it from the boot sequence or switching it around as I use it a lot for booting.. I guess most importantly I want to know HOW the HELL it is getting to that prompt when I've never seen it reboot while I am using it.

[bob1at7shore]

A long shot, but I had problems with lock ups (when in the BIOS setup) untill someone told me to disable the USB legacy support in the BIOS. Are you sing a USB keyboard? Try a PS2 keyboard. If your desperate I guess you would be willing to try anything.. ..
I've seen that message but only when I was experimenting, can't remember what I did though.

[kenc51]

Can you check if "suspend to RAM" is disabled in the BIOS? It could be your OS is trying to go into standby, but somehow it's not working.
Also, this could be caused by a minor short on the board or gfx card, can you run the rig outside of the case overnight? Just have the essential parts connected. While your doing this you could also run Memtest 86+ as if there's a faulty stick, it might only cause problems when the board tries to go to standby (if it's doing suspend to ram, it fills the ram with data before going to suspend mode)
What I'm thinking is, if a memory cell in the address range above ~900mb is faulty, it will only show up in rare cases....ie. when the ram is full. I had this problem with one of my sticks, everything was fine, except for random weirdness......memtest will find the problem in minutes. Loop test #2 for ~10mins, this test is quickest in finding hardware issues, then loop test #5 for a while, this will find any issues with memory settings like wrong timings and or voltages. Test #8 will test your chip set.

You could also download a Linux Live CD like Knoppix and run with that overnight, this will eliminate XP as an issue.

[Damn Dirty Ape]

A long shot, but I had problems with lock ups (when in the BIOS setup) untill someone told me to disable the USB legacy support in the BIOS. Are you sing a USB keyboard? Try a PS2 keyboard. If your desperate I guess you would be willing to try anything.. ..
I've seen that message but only when I was experimenting, can't remember what I did though.

I do have occasional lockups in the BIOS and the legacy USB is enabled. Hmm. Maybe not the answer to the reboots, BUT sounds like a fix for the bios freezes. Logitech lx3200 keyboard/mouse set, USB.


thx

[Damn Dirty Ape]

Can you check if "suspend to RAM" is disabled in the BIOS? It could be your OS is trying to go into standby, but somehow it's not working.
Also, this could be caused by a minor short on the board or gfx card, can you run the rig outside of the case overnight? Just have the essential parts connected. While your doing this you could also run Memtest 86+ as if there's a faulty stick, it might only cause problems when the board tries to go to standby (if it's doing suspend to ram, it fills the ram with data before going to suspend mode)
What I'm thinking is, if a memory cell in the address range above ~900mb is faulty, it will only show up in rare cases....ie. when the ram is full. I had this problem with one of my sticks, everything was fine, except for random weirdness......memtest will find the problem in minutes. Loop test #2 for ~10mins, this test is quickest in finding hardware issues, then loop test #5 for a while, this will find any issues with memory settings like wrong timings and or voltages. Test #8 will test your chip set.

You could also download a Linux Live CD like Knoppix and run with that overnight, this will eliminate XP as an issue.

I'll check that setting, I think it is enabled. I know in the power options I have it to sleep never, just blank the screen. Worth a try nonetheless. I did actually download the memtest tonight to burn to a CD, I'll check those tests out and see.

thanks!

[hkancyr]

I can't help with the restart problem. Whenever I get the "no boot device" message it has something to do with something plugged in to a USB port, sometimes something is resting on a button on a gaming device. Unplug some USB suspects and see if that helps.

[ubiquityman]

Could you be rebooting due to automatic updates?

What does the event log say as to when the reboot (shutdown) occurs?

Try disconnecting drives from the Marvell controller.