2 Gigabyte boards freezing on startup

edwardscomp

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Oct 17, 2014
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Computer specs 1: GA-H87M-D3H board, Intel I7-4790 processor, Kingston 16gb memory, 2 Western Digital RE 1tb drives, running Windows 7 Pro 64bit

Computer specs 2: GA-B85M-D3H board, Intel I5-4440 processor, Kingston 8gb memory, Black Edition Western Digital 500gb harddrive, running Windows 7 Pro 64bit


Over the past month I have had issues with machines starting to freeze on the start-up screen (when the splash screen comes up with Gigabyte's brand). The computers run for almost 3 days straight after being built with no problems. 2 machines with the B85M board & the other with the H87M board have been running for over a month and have just started freezing on the splash screen. Scanned the harddrives and no virus or type of Malware has been found. Bios on both boards were flashed/updated to the newest versions, all hardware have past tests and show no sign of damage or corruption. Unplugged the optical drive and the harddrive on both machines and still froze on start-up screen, tried to boot into safe-mode and still frozen on start-up screen.

On the non-raid boards (B85M) I was able to unplug the SATA cable from the harddrive (keeping the power still plugged into the drive), enable the "hot-plug" option in the bios, boot from a windows 7 cd, and during boot up plug the SATA cable back into the harddrive and bypass the startup screen, then I ran a windows repair and operations returned to normal. It looked like a fix for a while then the issue started to come up again.


I'm on machine 5 of doing this and I'm starting to wonder if there could possibly be a compatibility issue. Technically there shouldn't be since Gigabyte boards have the same chipset as the Intel boards, but I've run out of options at this point.
 

edwardscomp

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Oct 17, 2014
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There are no environmental factors. The units sit under desks and haven't been in production long enough to collect dust (when they come back to me they are clean no build up, no wiring issues, no form of hardware disruption). I know how unlikely it is for both PCs to show similar problems, but that is what is happening exactly.
 

edwardscomp

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Oct 17, 2014
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I built the machines and loaded the operating system and software. The machines were then sold directly to the same customer. We thought it was a virus at first, one like optimizer pro since I have had a machine do a similar thing but we ended up finding the virus as the culprit. These machines are on a closed network, running Trendnet anti-virus. Nothing was detected from Trendnet, and when I scanned the drives they all came up clean with no corruption detected.
 

edwardscomp

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Oct 17, 2014
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Unfortunately it was not just bad boards. Gigabyte has a few bugs in their boards they need to work out. After switching the boards out 3 different times, decided to go with Asus' model B85M board and haven't had issues with them since.