ASRock DeskMini suceptable to static discharge? Bad Adata M.2 PCI-E SX8000? Now: Pauses?

VirtualLarry

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Aug 25, 2001
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I think I've finally fried (partially) my first DeskMini unit. It's on my desk, near a door, near some rugs.

Well, I've walked by, and touched it, and zapped it a few times, on the chassis cover.

It has never rebooted or crashed from doing that.

However, one time I saw a temporary blob on my 4K UHD TV that appeared and disappeared.

A relative stopped by today, with a furry coat on. I fear that they touched the DeskMini somehow and zapped it, too.

Because, when I came out to my living room and looked at it, the HDD light was pulsing regularly, and when I woke up the monitor, I was in Linux. Which means, the DeskMini rebooted, but also, could NOT see my primary M.2 PCI-E SSD.

In fact, I rebooted, went into BIOS, and it wasn't showing up. I finally rebooted, used F11 for the Boot Menu, and selected "Windows Boot Manager", and then it booted off of the M.2 drive. Once in Windows, I rebooted, and then the BIOS saw the M.2 SSD again. Weird.

If that was the only problem, I wouldn't mind too much.

But now, I have no audio out, from either the DisplayPort,or the native HDMI port.

When I go to Device Manager, under System Devices, High Definition Audio Controller is Disabled, due to a Code 10. Both in Win7 Pro SP1 64-bit as well as Win10 Pro 64-bit 1607.

Even a full power-off, and then power-on, of both the DeskMini as well as the 4K UHD TV, doesn't help.

(However, I haven't tried moving the DeskMini to the other 4K UHD TV, to see if it works there.)

I postulated, when I first "zapped" my DeskMini, that it wasn't properly grounded from static, because the power cord is a two-conductor, without a chassis ground. I might be mistaken, it might have a third conductor, maybe. I haven't taken a close look.

But when I zapped it the first few times, and it didn't crash or reboot, I figured that it was OK.

Now, it's not.

One other thing, I used Intel's USB3.0 injector for Win7 64-bit on this rig, some time ago, and it wanted permission to run "Flash_Utility.exe". Which could have been for the flash drive creation, OR, it could have been a BIOS/chipset flash, for Intel's NUC, to "correct" an HDMI audio firmware issue. I know that my DeskMini "paused" for a second when running the thing, which makes me wonder if it did flash something NUC-related to my DeskMini, and maybe, that's why the HD Audio Controller isn't working anymore.

I guess I could re-flash the ASRock BIOS, maybe, to try to fix it.

I just can't fathom that I've not powered off the DeskMini since I ran that Flash_Utility.exe. Maybe I haven't.

I tried Internet Flash, but it just says my BIOS is up-to-date.

Edit: Just tried downloading the 7.00 BIOS for the DeskMini, and flashed it, and it didn't do anything. It updated the UEFI, but not the ME firmware, like it did the first time that I updated it.

Edit: This is the tool that I ran, on Win7 64-bit, that ran "Flash_Utility.exe", or wanted Admin permission for it.
https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/25476/Windows-7-USB-3-0-Creator-Utility
 
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VirtualLarry

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Ok, now I'm confused. I rebooted into Linux, it worked, miraculously, and then I rebooted into Windows, and it still worked. So I shut down completely (or as complete as Win10 will allow...hmm), and then powered it back up, and it still worked.

Don't ask me... gremlins!
 

VirtualLarry

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Aug 25, 2001
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Ok, this has happened twice in the last two days.

Come out to use my PC, and the HDD light is blinking at a regular pace, like there's an error condition, and the PC is booted into Linux (the default choice if the machine rebooted and the PCI-E M.2 SSD wasn't detected by UEFI).

Yesterday, when this happened, I rebooted from Linux, went into UEFI, M.2 SSD was not detected.

So I shut down, wait 10 seconds, and booted back into BIOS, and the M.2 SSD WAS detected. Booted into Win10, NO AUDIO devices found.

So, I shut down, unplugged every cable from the back, waited, plugged everything back in, and everything was working again.

Today, when it just happened, I shut it down, waited 10 seconds, powered up, booted into UEFI, M.2 SSD was detected, booted into Win10, and everything was OK. Had audio.

WTH is going on here? Is the SSD bad? (Just bought it a month or two ago.) Or is my H110M-STX mobo going bad? Power or static electricity gremlins?
 

VirtualLarry

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Aug 25, 2001
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Ok, more weirdness, it seems like it happened again, when I wasn't using the PC, and the monitor was in sleep mode? Only, this time, it rebooted back into Win10, so the M.2 SSD didn't drop out, and my audio is still working.

So, something is making it reboot. And no power-off. Hmm. :(

Edit: Still set to "Balanced", Monitor sleep after 10 minutes, PC sleep after "never".

Edit: I am running the newest Intel "4590" iGPU drivers. Maybe that's the problem?

Edit: Un-installed Intel 4590 iGPU drivers, and did a Windows Memory Diagnostic. (No errors found during the test, though I haven't seen the final results pop up after I logged in.)

Edit: Reliability Monitor lists some Red X error events. Code "144" and "ab". From what I could find searching, 144 is a driver error, and ab is an error that happens after a recent MS update, if you have "Fast Start" enabled. So I disabled that, let's see how things go. And rolled back the Intel iGPU driver.

Sigh. Just have to test it over the next few days. I hope that the issue really is just software, and not a bad SSD, or motherboard.
 
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VirtualLarry

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No, would that show anything different than Reliability Monitor?

I woke up the PC today, and it hadn't rebooted, all my programs were still running.
 

mxnerd

Diamond Member
Jul 6, 2007
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Maybe it can help, maybe not.

But maybe you can find something suspicious.

Usually you want to look at

Event Viewer - Custom Views - Administrative Events &
Event Viewer - Windows Log - System
 

VirtualLarry

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Aug 25, 2001
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So far, so good. Two days in a row waking up the PC, and it hasn't re-booted on me.

But I've noticed, that I'm getting what appear to be storage-related "Pauses".

Clicked on a minimized Explorer window, no issue.

Clicked on a minimized ImgBurn window, clicked Open, double-clicked an ISO file, and after I did that, I got an hourglass for 2-3 seconds. Kind of disturbing, really. (The ISO was under 300MB. Not huge.)

Wondering if this has anything to do with the thread talking about Firefox writing it's context file out every few seconds, and consuming bandwidth of my SSD.

Sometimes the same thing happens, when I start a download in Firefox, or go to bookmark a page.

I have 16GB of RAM in that machine, and I think I was using under 4GB for apps.

Win10 Pro 64-bit 1607.
 

mxnerd

Diamond Member
Jul 6, 2007
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Since I upgraded to Windows 10, it happened to me several times that the computer is not responsive, either mouse or keyboard, it could last several seconds to over half a minutes. But when I check the task manager, the CPU usage is actually very low.

Suspect that Windows 10 is doing some updates / download in the background, but really have no idea what's going on.
 

VirtualLarry

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Aug 25, 2001
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Hmm, it happened again. This time, I was watching.

The system was just idling, or maybe sleeping. Monitor (4K UHD TV) was off, powered down due to extended monitor sleep mode.

Then, I was across the room, and the monitor powered on again, only then I saw the BIOS screen, and then it booted into my SATA SSD (Linux loader / GRUB menu), rather than my M.2 SSD with Windows 10 (default boot selection).

So, at the Linux menu, I hit C-A-D to reboot into Windows 10, still booted to my SATA SSD and the Linux menu.

So I powered down, and then powered back up again, and it booted into Windows 10.

Not quite sure what's going on here.