Tom's Hardware > Forum > Overclocking > Motherboards > Odd problem
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lawrence56073   10-24-2006 at 11:30:08 PM

Here is my problem: I put together a new system last night. Hit the power switch, and it came up right. Installed XP, and noticed on the reboot that it would hang when it came time for the hard drive to start. I shut it down, did a cold start and it proceeded to finish the installation. I looked at the 4 diagnostic LED's, and they all are lit up in red. According to the manual, it is a bad CPU. It runs fine, for the one cavet, if you try to do a reboot, or warm-start, the 4 diagnostic LED's turn green, and when it comes time for the hard drive to start loading the O/S, it just freezes. This is 100% reproducable, and I have never seen the 4 diagnostic LED's go green from a cold start (power off, then turn on). However XP will load and it runs fine. Should I ever need to reboot, I need to shut down the system first, I cannot ever select Restart from XP as the 4 diagnostic LED's will go from red to green and it will stop when it comes time for the hard drive to load. It posts fine every time, even on reboot. I checked the manual and red LED's are bad, and it should be 4 green LED's that are lit, as with all the other MSI boards I have previously used. Heres my specs:

MSI K8N Neo4-F NF4 939 motherboard
CORSAR TWINX1024-3200C2PT (2)
AMD|A64 3500+ 2.2G 939
80 GB Maxtor 7200 rpm SATA drive
VGA PNY|6600 256M PCI Express
SAMSUNG|SH-S182M DVD lightscribe drive (IDE)
Antec Sonata II 450 watt case

I have double checked everything as far as connectors, replaced the sata and IDE cables. Re-inserted the CPU, video card, as well as the 24 pin and 4 pin connectors to the motherboard.

Like I said, it works fine, I installed the latest drivers from nvidia for the graphics card and motherboard chipset. I also used the MSI Live update to update the bios and it flashed a newer version of the bios with no problems. I have re-inserted the memory, and also ran it with only 1 memory stick, and the problem remains. Can it really be a bad CPU? I have never had this type of problem in all the years of building systems.

Thanks in advance for your helpful advice.

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lawrence56073   10-25-2006 at 03:30:55 AM
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I guess I solved this mystery, I had another set-up, nearly similar to this one, and decided to swap out the cpu, and it was fine after all. I remembered reading in another forum about some n-force 4 msi motherboards and maxtor hard drives don't get along so I decided to swap out the 80GB sata drive with an older Maxtor 60GB sata drive that I had in an external sata enclosure to see what would happen, and now the reboot problem as well as the diagnostic LED's always showing green are now solved. I put the 80GB in the external case and tried to format from my other computer and it won't show up under "computer management" from the administrative tools under the control panel. Looks like something is kind of wonky with the drive and I'll return it for a replacement.

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cmptrdude79   10-25-2006 at 04:23:08 PM
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Glad to hear you got that taken care of. I was left scratching my head.

-J

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