Vista SP1 - Beware

Hello,

Thought I would let you all know about my experience with Vista SP1 beta. Just to let everyone know, please don't flame vista or my rig, I know they both suck, but whatever. I'm hoping people will not have to live this and perhaps some guru out there can shed some light on what happened.

I just built a new rig:
9600 phenom
ATI 3850
Asus M3A
2g Crutial 1066mhz
500gb Seagate HD

I installed vista, dealt with the driver issue the M3A had with it's atheros lan and got hooked to the net. I then updated all patches on windows update. Then I went and installed Vista SP1 Beta. It rebooted, and I was ready to rock. (In my ignorance, i read the SP1 fixed some stuff and made life better). I shut down, went to sleep,work and then my wife called me and told me my PC died. Something about an error saying windows would not start.

When I got home, i received the message in the BIOS loading:

Checking nvram..
not enough space in in runtime area!!. SMBIOS data will not be available.

Basically, it will not boot. I can get into the BIOS setup and mess around, but can't get it to boot from win cd, 3.5 floppy, usb, anything. Here is what I did for troubleshooting.
- verified it's not ram,video card. I was able to swap em out with some others
- reseated CPU, power cables, everything.
- flashed cmos, updated BIOS,
- disconnected Hard drive and DVDROM

Still getting the same error. I spent 3 hours on the phone with ASUS (3% talking with someone) paying long distance charges for them to basically tell me they have no idea what the problem is. Told me to RMA the board.

I called Microsoft to poop on them and basically say vista sp1 killed my MB. They could not help.

I googled some of the items in the error msg and found out the following.
NVRAM is Non-volatile ram. AKA, it doesn't get erased every time you shut down the PC. It holds the SMBIOS. Basically NVRAM is like an eeprom on an instrument (lab geek I am)
SMBIOS is the system management BIOS which comunicates hardware info to the OS. Vista can modify the SMBIOS through special tools - or perhaps through the SP1 update??? correct me if i'm wrong.

The microsoft guy said, when the system info in the "runtime area" is too large for the NVRAM, you get this error, but he had no info on how it happens and how to fix it.

Share my story, take warning, and if you have any technical advice for me, please let me know.

I just intalled SP1 today in the morning , and it works perfectly. I like it , because even the game performance is better. General performance is either better. It's stable (even though even without SP1 , Vista was stable for me).
Everything works fine and I'm happy with it.
I just had few problems installing SP1 , but that was just corrupted files.
So I had to re-download SP1 and everything works fine.

I think the problem is your rig , not SP1.

I had a problem with several of the default Vista drivers for SATA controllers. I would check for the latest drivers. I had an issue similar to what you are describing and I was finally able to correct the issue when I tried loading manufacturer drivers for the SATA contrtoller during vista setup instead of the default windows drivers.

Thanks for the info guys, but, i don't get any boot up now, not even the dos screen, there is no video output at all now to my monitor? How can I remedy this? I can't even get back to the point of the original error message so i can't just re-install windows...?

Help, yikes.

ok, i'll try that but i don't have another video card, so i will just try to remove it and put it back i guess.

If I ever get this thing back to re-loading windows I will also try to try downloading the SATA controller drivers as quadropheniac said above...

Yes, but I cannot get into windows to do that I am stuck with this error message before windows boots up:
Checking nvram..
not enough space in in runtime area!!. SMBIOS data will not be available.
you can get into a limited bios screen but you then cannot get the computer to re-install windows or boot from disk in any way, that's the problem, it's just stuck completely there.

I went to try another video card and that didn't help, same problem, so it's not the video card.

Your battery might be dead. Get a new one, or leave you computer on for a week so it charges. Sounds like you are screwed. If you can at least boot from a floppy you may be able to load linux or something, because it doesn't need a bios to boot.