ASUS Rampage Formula Boot Problem

[ExistNY]

Hi all,

This is really frustrating. When I press the power button, I hear a single beep, and the main asus splash screen ("Republic of Gamers" etc.) pops up. There is a shiny glimmer that's supposed to trace the red/black symbol at the center of the asus splash screen -- it goes about half way across and then stops. My computer will go no further into the boot process.

I unplugged everything but the monitor and the usb dongle for my wireless keyboard, and I managed to get it to boot once. One note though, I had been using Asus's overclocking bios software, and my computer informed me that it could no longer overclock (I had gone from 9450 to 9550). This was fine, so I set the overclocking back to auto.

Some more oddities -- I installed a memory card reader. In the past, it used to give me a satisfying red led when the computer was on. Now, it remains blank.

My configuration:

ASUS Rampage Formula
Q9450
8MB RAM
ATI 4870
Soundblaster Elite Pro
2 disc drives (sony blu-ray; pioneer dvd)
1 HD WD black 1gb

Any help would be very much appreciated!

Thank you.

 

[ExistNY]

This actually gets stranger. Apparently this problem occurs if the two USB ports closest to the edge on the same row as the ethernet jack are used. I removed USB devices from those two ports and it booted fine again.

See this link for others with the same issue: http://www.overclock.net/intel-motherboards/389435-yet-another-problem-my-rampage-formula.html

Does anyone have any input on this really, really weird problem? Has anyone encountered anything like this before? I'm not so concerned about the loss of use of my two USB ports, I just want a stable board. If this is a symptom of a larger problem, I'd prefer to take care of it.

Thanks!