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Asus sabertooth 990 fx booting problem
Hi guys!
So, I was helping a friend set up his new computer with the parts that had arrived. After god knows how many hours we got it running. Then installed win 7 from a flashdrive to a HDD. logged in and everything was hunkadory. Then he decided he wanted to put the watercooling in. Yay... So, when yanking the CPU fan of the CPU he managed to pull the chip of the input, or whatevs it's called. He got som TIM on it, but I cleaned it at i started working again. We got the red LED light before i cleaned on startup, no POST. Now that we got that fixed and the watercooler was installed. Sooo now we can't get the thing to boot properly. When checking the bootrpiority in BIOS we checked for the HDD as the primary startup option. It was selected, but still wouldn't boot properly. Even when trying ot override it, it said "no drivers found". He reinstalled win 7 and after a couple of autorestarts the machine booted up and he could log in properly. So now it works fine, but what we would like to know is why it was like this in the beginning. So that IF it happens again we/he could fix it.
This is his setup:
Motherboard: Asus Sabertooth 990 FX
CPU: AMD Phenom II 1090T
GPU: Nvidia GTX 460 GS 1 GB
RAM: 16 GB ddr3 1333mhz
Kuhler 920 H2Ocooler
Case: Phantom NZXT
Thanks for reading this far and any help would be appreciated!
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Comments
Ignore me had misread post.
So it's working now?
I have no idea what you mean by "he managed to pull the chip of the input, or whatevs it's called" or "before i cleaned on startup"
If it's working now - I'd just leave it alone. As to why it got all busted up - no clue, depending on what those two statements above mean, it could literally be anything. Just changing out a heat sink, if done properly, shouldn't change anything with the computer boot or BIOS or anything else.
Did he pull the processor while trying to remove the cooling fan, is that what happened?
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Alright, poor explaining by me. When he decided to install the watercooler he had to remove the CPU fan from the CPU. But because of the TIM that held them together he pulled the 'chip' out, not sure if thats the correct term, so that all the golden pins were visible. That's the best i can do.
Now the computer isn't really working, it has to reboot three times before it starts up properly. Any ideas?
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if the pins arent bent he may have damaged the socket since it locks those in place
*edit* actually thats probably not the problem since you said it does start up properly. A few questions:
1. When you say it has to reboot 3 times before it starts properly do you mean it cycles itself 3 times and then boots? Or does it halt booting and you're forced to hit the reset button three times?
2. Does it do this only from a shutdown or does it do this during a restart?
3. Are you currenlty overclocking?
the reason I ask is because I have an asus p8p67 pro which is a similiar board and when I overclock the computer usually cycles 3 times from a shut down before it boots up. It has to do with overclocking. If I just restart the computer it restarts normally but if the computer is shut down completely and I hit the power button, it does a reboot loop 3 times. Its a known issue and can be corrected by not overclocking.
1: It cycles, but it doesn't really go beyond the first logo. It says "no drives found", then it restarts.
2: Cycles when 'restart' is used
3: No, he is not overclocking.
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sorry man, i got nothing
That means everything is ok with the ram and processor. The board won't get that far if there was a problem there. Have you tried reseating all the power and data cables from the board and hard drives? Also, you could try resetting the bios to factory defaults and see if that fixes it.
AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 955 Processor (4 CPUs), ~3.2GHz
6142MB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260
Antec Gaming Phenom
Windows Vista Home Premium
I think in the first post the error was listed as "no drivers found". Was it no drives or no drivers?
There is an error "no drivers" which these days is generally related to a raid setup.
No drives.. where you can see the drives in bios but windows won't detect them is another error. (you mentioned being able to see the drive you had selected as the boot drive in bios so I assume bios was seeing it fine).
The only thing I could even guess at would be some blunt force was transmitted through the case to the HDD(s). Which randomly happened to corrupt or damage where the data for the HDD(s) was stored. Then regardless of error message (drives/drivers) it was because the information was corrupted for windows to interact with the HDD(s). When your friend reinstalled Windows 7 the data was rewritten and thus fixed... something like that anyway.
So that pretty much would be the fix in that scenario (when you can't even get to windows). There are other options like doing a "repair install" which is kind of the same thing but you retain your data (no format). Sometimes if you are good with the command console you can fix some issues like that.
I suppose if he did a full reinstall format and all.. its even possible the master boot record (mbr) for the HDD was the problem. Generally when the hardware works enough to post and try to load but cannot... your "fix" is going to be a reinstall unless your HDD is actually failing.
Hopefully I didn't misread this post and my response makes some sense.. time for bed.
Oh and I just went over to water cooling on my gaming rig as well. Was a nice drop which suprised me because from what I read it didn't seem like going from a Hyper 212+ to a Corsair H80 would drop much. While gaming my temp dropped about 8 degrees but mostly I wanted to have less stress on my motherboard (that hyper 212+ was huge).
Try doing a factory reset on the BIOS (check the motherboard manual). Also check for a BIOS update on Asuses web site.
If that fails, and it's new new - just RMA the motherboard.
It's definitely a motherboard problem. I would guess that when the CPU was ripped out of the socket it's possible the BIOS got corrupt - if a reset and/or upgrade don't fix the problem, then a cap or something may have gotten out of whack and it will probably just always do that.