Computer Issues

Anyone have a good guide for tweaking the settings on a Gigabyte Z170X-UD5? I've been having some issues with my new Skylake setup. It doesn't seem to want to detect the Intel 750 SSD when I boot up from a cold start. Not sure why, but it'll ask me to insert a boot drive, I hit ctrl alt delete, and then it boots to windows fine. And it's not as simple as setting the boot priority in the BIOS, I don't think, because Windows Boot Manager is the 1st thing in order. And I'd just like a decent reference guide for other BIOS tweaking. Been a long time since I fucked around much in a BIOS, and I don't recognize most of this shit. Sometimes the recognition of my USB keyboard and mouse on boot-up is wonky as well, preventing me from even getting in to the BIOS.

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Fucked around with it for an hour tonight. Tried unplugging absolutely any and all USB items from the computer to see if I could get it to cold boot, and it did on the first try, but then wouldn't repeat. It only booted from a cold start about twice out of ten times. Otherwise it just seems to hang at the American Megatrends screen. If I hit the reset button, it boots fine. But if I hit the power button to shut it off and then hit it again to turn it back on, generally it will not boot, hanging at the AM screen again. I turned off any boot options other than the SSD. I turned off fast boot, and tried another couple options with it. Nothing seems to work. It just will not boot from a cold start consistently, but it's fine with a restart either from within Win10 or from the stuck boot screen. No more issues with it not seeing the boot drive, at least.

This is really frustrating, as otherwise the computer is running like a champ.

Eomer_sl said:

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Fucked around with it for an hour tonight. Tried unplugging absolutely any and all USB items from the computer to see if I could get it to cold boot, and it did on the first try, but then wouldn't repeat. It only booted from a cold start about twice out of ten times. Otherwise it just seems to hang at the American Megatrends screen. If I hit the reset button, it boots fine. But if I hit the power button to shut it off and then hit it again to turn it back on, generally it will not boot, hanging at the AM screen again. I turned off any boot options other than the SSD. I turned off fast boot, and tried another couple options with it. Nothing seems to work. It just will not boot from a cold start consistently, but it's fine with a restart either from within Win10 or from the stuck boot screen. No more issues with it not seeing the boot drive, at least.

This is really frustrating, as otherwise the computer is running like a champ.

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Check for any bios updates for the motherboard and also any firmware updates for the SSD. Also, do you have the hard drive set in the bios correctly? Dumb question I know, but sometimes they get listed as IDE drives instead of AHCI.

If it's your lone drive, make sure it's in your first sata 6Gbps port too. Some motherboards can be finicky like that.

BIOS is up to date for the mobo, will have to check on the SSD. But that doesn't really seem to be the problem now. It's an Intel 750 SSD, so it's on a PCI-Express slot. For whatever reason, it's been finding the SSD fine if it gets past the initial American Megatrends screen now. Before it was getting past the AM screen, then not finding the SSD and trying to boot from USB/DVD. I think there might be some sort of USB conflict or short or something, because unplugging nearly everything did seem to let it boot 10-20% of the time, as opposed to basically zero before. I didn't unplug the internal USB 3.0 headers for the front panel or the 2.0 ones used for the Corsair CPU cooler or power supply last night, so I'm going to give that a try over the weekend and see if I can find what's causing it. Past that, the only other thing I could really unplug is the DVD drive. I guess I could try booting with the integrated graphics as well.

On top of the issues with booting, I'd ordered a new display port cable as the one that came with the monitor was too short with my desk setup. Fucking thing is defective. I'm thinking that this computer may be cursed. I really hope that it's not ultimately a problem with the mobo, that'll be a pain in the cunt to remove and RMA.

It's in a PCI-Express x4 slot. So not the slot where I'd put a second GPU. Basically the bottom one. Haven't tried messing around with that as yet either.

Is there an option to change boot options to UEFI only? That will skip DVD and USB.

Noodlemod_sl said:

Is there an option to change boot options to UEFI only? That will skip DVD and USB.

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Eomer_sl said:

I turned off any boot options other than the SSD.

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Didn't make a difference. And yes, there's options to fast/ultra fast boot etc. I haven't played with them in a systematic fashion as yet, but some preliminary fucking around didn't seem to fix anything.

I meant if there is an option to disable legacy boots entirely. Mixing UEFI and Legacy boot options can cause issues with UEFI variables getting wiped out.

Ah. I'll take a close look at that. Like I said in my original post, it sure would be nice to have a guide or FAQ for a modern BIOS. I did some quick googling and didn't see much. The amount of options is bewildering, and as always the descriptions are fucking useless.

I write UEFI BIOS so I can describe some, but even some are foreign to me

My USB 3.0 ports only work on some days, some days they do and some they don't.

It's not a major issue, just annoying really.

Borzak_sl said:

My USB 3.0 ports only work on some days, some days they do and some they don't.

It's not a major issue, just annoying really.

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I had this issue when I pushed my overclock a bit too far.

I think his issue is tied to the SSD being a PCI-E drive. There have always been issues with using those as boot drives. The old revo drives had these issues too afaik.

If you have a UEFI partition on more than the one drive, it could be causing problems as well. I don't know nearly enough about all that stuff to give more insight than that though.

Flipmode_sl said:

I think his issue is tied to the SSD being a PCI-E drive. There have always been issues with using those as boot drives. The old revo drives had these issues too afaik.

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I don't think so, at this point. If you read my posts in order, the SSD being unrecognized was only a problem initially, and it seems to have gone away for whatever reason. Now, the computer freezes at the American Megatrends POST screen (do computers still POST?) when booting from being powered off. I can't even get in to the BIOS. It says "hit del to enter configuration" or whatever, but it's frozen solid. It just stays stuck at that screen until I hit reset, then it boots fine.

System is not overclocked, either. Like I said though, I've got some homework to do to test various settings and unplugging devices to see if I can isolate what the problem is. At this point it could be the SSD, USB devices/headers, or BIOS settings.

PC's still POST but that's just an AMI BIOS spash screen. The computer is likely hanging while it's trying to enumerate the drive on the PCI bus or something.

Easy way to test this would be to remove the drive and just keep rebooting the PC and see if it ever hangs. If not your drive is suspect.