Hello all, firstly, here are my specs then...sorry...long read incoming.
Mobo: GigaByte GA-X58A-UD3R (Edit: Rev2)
Chip: i7-950 3.06 GHz 8M Intel Smart Cache LGA1366
Ram: DDR3/1600MHz Triple Channel Corsair 4GBx3
Main HDD: 30GBx2 Kingston SDD Setup in Raid 0
Secondary HDD: 2TBx2 Hitachi Setup in Raid 1
Vid Card: GTX 780
Cpu Cooler: Corsair H100
Sound: Creative Labs SB X-Fi Xtreme Audio 24-BIT PCI Sound Card
PSU: Corsair HX1000w
And numerous fans, Bluray (Sata connected), 12in1 Flash Media Reader/Writer
OS: Win7 Ultimate
So here is my tale - hopefully someone here might be able to point me in the right direction or say that I am going that way.
Backstory:
Alright, years ago I had an older liquid cooling system in my pc - sadly, the tubing got corroded and when I noticed I was having temp issues and opened up the case to see what was going on...the tubing split and a lovely waterfall started gushing straight down on my older gtx 580, sound card and some of my mobo/psu. Of course I freaked out and gave that computer the quickest reach-around known to man and yanked out the power cable.
I salvaged everything. Did the rice trick with the video card and no damage at all to anything, psu was fine - water didn't really get inside of it. The video card literally had water pouring out of it - and to my surprised, it worked flawlessly. Anyway, went with the Corsair H100 after that, since it was all internal and no chances of any air reaching the water and causing it to rain on my components. HOWEVER, I did read that people who did have issues like mine noticed that after a year or two their video card did go back - eventually it would short out. I was expecting this.
Fast forward to two months ago, around cyber monday. I was playing a game and suddenly the monitor lost signal, the video card fan went to 100% and seemed like my whole computer locked up. Booted back into windows and checked the gpu temp, was fine - and then it crashed again with the same symptoms. I tried to boot it up a few other times but it started crashing before, during and as soon as I logged into windows. I simply let it rest for a few and tried it again later that night.
So I log into my machine later, checked temps on everything - monitored gpu, processors etc - all were fine. Processors were in the low 30s, gpu was floating around the same but I can't remember. I let it stay there for awhile then a few hours later I started continuing to use it. Nothing crazy in the logs too. Finally, it shut down again and the constant on/off cycling of the computer started - had difficulty trying to get to windows. When it was going on/off - it literally would turn on for a second, then crash again. Over and over.
And now, the troubleshooting starts:
My first thought, of course, was the video card was finally going bad. I went into an older machine of mine and removed a geforce 6800 Ultra card. Decided that I would double check with that and see how it behaved. I did, and it went fine - no issues the whole night. Checked temps again, all were fine - operated pretty poorly, almost unusable, but no booting issues. I was happy, gave me an excuse to give to the wife for an upgrade.
Purchased a new GTX780 from Newegg. It arrived and I installed it - ran great, no issues.
Well, sadly when I was out of town a few days after Christmas my wife called and told me we had 'lost power' and she needed some over the phone help to get the computer resynched to our western digital drive so she could stream media off of it. Come to find out, the power being 'lost' was from my 21 month old playing with the button on my surge protector under my desk. When I got home the next day - the issues were back.
Looking like the monitor lost signal, cycling through it's inputs. Really loud fan noise now since the gtx 780 has two. Computer locking up - having to hard boot it. It would turn on for a second, then off. Sometimes would boot into windows and crash again, same symptoms as before. Checked temps, were fine when the system was stable enough to check them. So, woe is me, I had a problem.
Since I had a new video card I kinda of ruled that out of the equation since that was extremely unlikely it would suddenly be given the exact same issues as my previous. When it was stable again I updated all drivers for everything - except my bios.
Issue continued. Tried to update my bios with Gigabytes software @Bios and it didn't work - horrible program and I highly suggest you avoid it. Tried to load the software onto a usb drive, fomatted it to fat32 and the board didn't detect my drive. Reset the CMOS, pulled the battery - did the 'unpower and hold down the power button' trick. No go. Even removed the battery on the mobo for 30 seconds.
Checked all the cabling in my pc. Removed the video card altogether and it still would crash and shutdown altogether.
Figured it might be a mobo or psu issue. Went to best buy and bought a 850w thermaltake psu to test it with. Disconnected the 24 and 8 pin on the mobo, replaced it with the thermaltake and booted it. I let it run for a few minutes and thought that was a good sign. Started plugging in the rest of the components - yet during this, I was also testing the power as well - and it still shut down a couple of times. Tried this with the old and new cables that came with the psu.
I finally plugged the monitor. Now, something different happens.
After the post/splash screen I received a 'AHCI BIOS NOT INSTALLED!!!!' message. It tries to load and says NO DRIVES DETECTED. The AHCI message is completly new to me - hadn't seen that during the load of my computer ever before. The last time it loaded, prior to swapping the psu, it loaded fine. Of course, after the NO DRIVES DETECTED I get the message of DISK FAILUE PLEASE INSERT SYSTEM DISC.
Well, at that point I ruled out it was a psu issue anyway and figured I'd just plug my Corsair back in. I did so, including the cables it was previously using. Replugged those back into the drives. Powered it up - same exact error messages. I figured, maybe during the course of removing the psu it somehow reset something in the bios so I entered the bios and started testing.
Sata on IDE, AHCI or Raid - it wasn't picking up anything. Nothing was allowing me to see anything plugged into the ICHR10 at all - even my Bluray wasn't being hit by power. I knew the power was coming out from the psu since that is where my Corsair was plugged into over my CPU which was lit up and powering 2 fans - but no real reponse from the drives themselves.
Note: I have not tried the 4 HDDs nor the Bluray at another machine - nothing I have is compatible with them besides this rig.
Then, low and behold - I went into the PC Health section of the bios while looking at each of the bios menus to see if I missed something. CPU temp was 102.
After doing some digging, I found out the pump on my Corsair H100 was bad after plugging in their 3pin female connector to the cpu fan and seeing a 0 next to the speed. Apparently, from what I can gather, is it was acting sporadically - which is why the temps I saw previous were fine when the system was stable enough for me to actually check the temps during Windows boot. I couldn't access the bios during previous troubleshooting most of the time due to the simple fact it was turning off and on so quickly.
Sadly, when I returned the psu to bestbuy to swap out for some sort of heatsink (never doing liquid cooling again, mind you), I find out they no longer sell those types of items in the store. There is no solid vendor around here that I can really go and buy something from so I ordered the Cooler Master Hyper N520. That should be arriving tomorrow.
Still, I am stuck with the issue of no drives being detected and nothing plugged into my sata ports seem to turn on. I usually wait an hour or so, quickly turn on the pc and go into the bios and tweak a setting here or there. Power was set to auto, I upped it for the ICHR10 host/controller to 1.1, 1.2. The southbridge light was a solid green when I did that. I even changed it to 1.4 and it went yellow - apparently power is getting through there.
I am thinking it might have to do something with a possibly corrupted bios/driver but again, no usb to update Gigabyte's bios since it is picky about what usb it will detect. I am getting some spares from some folks tonight to try with - I still have the data on my other usb stick and will flash the bios over.
All my HDDs and Bluray are plugged into the sata2 ports, I tried the Bluray (easiest to see if it works due to the lights) in the Sata3 ports as well - no change. Swapped the config in the bios from IDE, to AHCI, to Raid - no option appears to detect anything through the Controller.
I doubt all 3 would have burnt out - I am wondering if the SATA ports/controller did? Hoping a bios update might fix it if the board decides it actually will try to read the usb.
Sadly, I can't really troubleshoot that much until that new Cooler Master comes in so I can keep the CPU levels normal so I'm reaching out and seeing if anyone else has any suggestions. Last resort...trying to find a new mobo. Trying to avoid that. My grand plan of a money tree hasn't come to fruition yet. Not to mention it is difficult to find a newer model one that will fit my component specs and I want to avoid getting a controller card if possible.
TLDR: If you read this all the way through, thanks. I am open to suggestions - I have probably skipped thigns I did try on my machine, but as it stands now, computer didn't have any issues loading drives before changing a psu - now it suddenly says 'ahci bios not installed' and it cannot detect drives, giving me the 'DISK FAILURE' message.
Mobo: GigaByte GA-X58A-UD3R (Edit: Rev2)
Chip: i7-950 3.06 GHz 8M Intel Smart Cache LGA1366
Ram: DDR3/1600MHz Triple Channel Corsair 4GBx3
Main HDD: 30GBx2 Kingston SDD Setup in Raid 0
Secondary HDD: 2TBx2 Hitachi Setup in Raid 1
Vid Card: GTX 780
Cpu Cooler: Corsair H100
Sound: Creative Labs SB X-Fi Xtreme Audio 24-BIT PCI Sound Card
PSU: Corsair HX1000w
And numerous fans, Bluray (Sata connected), 12in1 Flash Media Reader/Writer
OS: Win7 Ultimate
So here is my tale - hopefully someone here might be able to point me in the right direction or say that I am going that way.
Backstory:
Alright, years ago I had an older liquid cooling system in my pc - sadly, the tubing got corroded and when I noticed I was having temp issues and opened up the case to see what was going on...the tubing split and a lovely waterfall started gushing straight down on my older gtx 580, sound card and some of my mobo/psu. Of course I freaked out and gave that computer the quickest reach-around known to man and yanked out the power cable.
I salvaged everything. Did the rice trick with the video card and no damage at all to anything, psu was fine - water didn't really get inside of it. The video card literally had water pouring out of it - and to my surprised, it worked flawlessly. Anyway, went with the Corsair H100 after that, since it was all internal and no chances of any air reaching the water and causing it to rain on my components. HOWEVER, I did read that people who did have issues like mine noticed that after a year or two their video card did go back - eventually it would short out. I was expecting this.
Fast forward to two months ago, around cyber monday. I was playing a game and suddenly the monitor lost signal, the video card fan went to 100% and seemed like my whole computer locked up. Booted back into windows and checked the gpu temp, was fine - and then it crashed again with the same symptoms. I tried to boot it up a few other times but it started crashing before, during and as soon as I logged into windows. I simply let it rest for a few and tried it again later that night.
So I log into my machine later, checked temps on everything - monitored gpu, processors etc - all were fine. Processors were in the low 30s, gpu was floating around the same but I can't remember. I let it stay there for awhile then a few hours later I started continuing to use it. Nothing crazy in the logs too. Finally, it shut down again and the constant on/off cycling of the computer started - had difficulty trying to get to windows. When it was going on/off - it literally would turn on for a second, then crash again. Over and over.
And now, the troubleshooting starts:
My first thought, of course, was the video card was finally going bad. I went into an older machine of mine and removed a geforce 6800 Ultra card. Decided that I would double check with that and see how it behaved. I did, and it went fine - no issues the whole night. Checked temps again, all were fine - operated pretty poorly, almost unusable, but no booting issues. I was happy, gave me an excuse to give to the wife for an upgrade.
Purchased a new GTX780 from Newegg. It arrived and I installed it - ran great, no issues.
Well, sadly when I was out of town a few days after Christmas my wife called and told me we had 'lost power' and she needed some over the phone help to get the computer resynched to our western digital drive so she could stream media off of it. Come to find out, the power being 'lost' was from my 21 month old playing with the button on my surge protector under my desk. When I got home the next day - the issues were back.
Looking like the monitor lost signal, cycling through it's inputs. Really loud fan noise now since the gtx 780 has two. Computer locking up - having to hard boot it. It would turn on for a second, then off. Sometimes would boot into windows and crash again, same symptoms as before. Checked temps, were fine when the system was stable enough to check them. So, woe is me, I had a problem.
Since I had a new video card I kinda of ruled that out of the equation since that was extremely unlikely it would suddenly be given the exact same issues as my previous. When it was stable again I updated all drivers for everything - except my bios.
Issue continued. Tried to update my bios with Gigabytes software @Bios and it didn't work - horrible program and I highly suggest you avoid it. Tried to load the software onto a usb drive, fomatted it to fat32 and the board didn't detect my drive. Reset the CMOS, pulled the battery - did the 'unpower and hold down the power button' trick. No go. Even removed the battery on the mobo for 30 seconds.
Checked all the cabling in my pc. Removed the video card altogether and it still would crash and shutdown altogether.
Figured it might be a mobo or psu issue. Went to best buy and bought a 850w thermaltake psu to test it with. Disconnected the 24 and 8 pin on the mobo, replaced it with the thermaltake and booted it. I let it run for a few minutes and thought that was a good sign. Started plugging in the rest of the components - yet during this, I was also testing the power as well - and it still shut down a couple of times. Tried this with the old and new cables that came with the psu.
I finally plugged the monitor. Now, something different happens.
After the post/splash screen I received a 'AHCI BIOS NOT INSTALLED!!!!' message. It tries to load and says NO DRIVES DETECTED. The AHCI message is completly new to me - hadn't seen that during the load of my computer ever before. The last time it loaded, prior to swapping the psu, it loaded fine. Of course, after the NO DRIVES DETECTED I get the message of DISK FAILUE PLEASE INSERT SYSTEM DISC.
Well, at that point I ruled out it was a psu issue anyway and figured I'd just plug my Corsair back in. I did so, including the cables it was previously using. Replugged those back into the drives. Powered it up - same exact error messages. I figured, maybe during the course of removing the psu it somehow reset something in the bios so I entered the bios and started testing.
Sata on IDE, AHCI or Raid - it wasn't picking up anything. Nothing was allowing me to see anything plugged into the ICHR10 at all - even my Bluray wasn't being hit by power. I knew the power was coming out from the psu since that is where my Corsair was plugged into over my CPU which was lit up and powering 2 fans - but no real reponse from the drives themselves.
Note: I have not tried the 4 HDDs nor the Bluray at another machine - nothing I have is compatible with them besides this rig.
Then, low and behold - I went into the PC Health section of the bios while looking at each of the bios menus to see if I missed something. CPU temp was 102.
After doing some digging, I found out the pump on my Corsair H100 was bad after plugging in their 3pin female connector to the cpu fan and seeing a 0 next to the speed. Apparently, from what I can gather, is it was acting sporadically - which is why the temps I saw previous were fine when the system was stable enough for me to actually check the temps during Windows boot. I couldn't access the bios during previous troubleshooting most of the time due to the simple fact it was turning off and on so quickly.
Sadly, when I returned the psu to bestbuy to swap out for some sort of heatsink (never doing liquid cooling again, mind you), I find out they no longer sell those types of items in the store. There is no solid vendor around here that I can really go and buy something from so I ordered the Cooler Master Hyper N520. That should be arriving tomorrow.
Still, I am stuck with the issue of no drives being detected and nothing plugged into my sata ports seem to turn on. I usually wait an hour or so, quickly turn on the pc and go into the bios and tweak a setting here or there. Power was set to auto, I upped it for the ICHR10 host/controller to 1.1, 1.2. The southbridge light was a solid green when I did that. I even changed it to 1.4 and it went yellow - apparently power is getting through there.
I am thinking it might have to do something with a possibly corrupted bios/driver but again, no usb to update Gigabyte's bios since it is picky about what usb it will detect. I am getting some spares from some folks tonight to try with - I still have the data on my other usb stick and will flash the bios over.
All my HDDs and Bluray are plugged into the sata2 ports, I tried the Bluray (easiest to see if it works due to the lights) in the Sata3 ports as well - no change. Swapped the config in the bios from IDE, to AHCI, to Raid - no option appears to detect anything through the Controller.
I doubt all 3 would have burnt out - I am wondering if the SATA ports/controller did? Hoping a bios update might fix it if the board decides it actually will try to read the usb.
Sadly, I can't really troubleshoot that much until that new Cooler Master comes in so I can keep the CPU levels normal so I'm reaching out and seeing if anyone else has any suggestions. Last resort...trying to find a new mobo. Trying to avoid that. My grand plan of a money tree hasn't come to fruition yet. Not to mention it is difficult to find a newer model one that will fit my component specs and I want to avoid getting a controller card if possible.
TLDR: If you read this all the way through, thanks. I am open to suggestions - I have probably skipped thigns I did try on my machine, but as it stands now, computer didn't have any issues loading drives before changing a psu - now it suddenly says 'ahci bios not installed' and it cannot detect drives, giving me the 'DISK FAILURE' message.
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