boot issue: building dmi pool... flash rom protected

[chansigrilian]

occasionally when booting up my htpc i get a message during boot, instead of "verifying dmi pool" i get "building dmi pool" followed by "flash rom protected", which consequently leads into a no system disk detected.

power off, power on will reboot fine. happens perhaps 1/3 boots. does not matter hot/cold boot.

system specs:

amd athlon64 x2 4200 windsor am2
patriot 2gb (2x1gb) pc6400
wd 72gb (2x36gb) raptors in raid 0 boot drive
gigabyte m57sli mainboard
evga 7900gtx gpu
550w psu
windows xp sp2

some research has suggested a possible weak board battery, but the board is less than a year old. i'll probably pick up a battery and try it anyway.

is there some item in the bios config that could cause this? i seem to remember having a similiar problem on another rig that was related to usb devices being plugged in during boot. this system does have quite a few usb devices, including wireless logitech keyboard, wireless gyration mouse, wireless linksys card, storage drives (off during boot), wireless logitech gamepad and an apc ups.

have not tried updating or clearing the bios yet, thought i'd get some feedback first, any help appreciated.

some other info from a post i found yesterday with other folks having this problem, however with my board not being the same that the thread was about i figured it needed it's own thread.

originally posted by: chansigril

Originally posted by: cdfire

Originally posted by: TheBeagle
Good Evening Everyone.

The F4f BIOS seems to work pretty much the same as the F4e one for me. However, I'm still getting an intermittent condition on boot up (using Vista Ultimate), where at the end of the POST, the last screen line says:

"Building DMI Pool.................................Flash ROM Protected"

Then the whole thing reboots and goes through the POST process again. However, after a number of reboots, when it finally decides to go into Vista, the last line on the POST display reads as follows:

"Verifying DMI Pool Data......................."

Once in Vista the whole rig is rock solid and functions perfectly.

I'm using these settings:
FSB = 378
Multiplier = 9
Vcore = 1.450
DRAM = 2.25V
**************
Speed = 3.4 GHz

For the life of me, I can't seem to figure out why it takes several boot cycles in order for Vista to make the jump into Windows. If anyone has a REAL solution for this situation, I'd like to hear about it. Thanks. TheBeagle

This is exactly what I get every once in a while in Windows XP Pro 32. Pc runs great, but every once in a while upon reboot or system startup, I get this same thing. "Verifying DMI Pool Data......................." and then I have to reboot to get into windows.

As stated before I also get F2 showing in any windows program which shows the BIOS only it will be followed by the new BIOS File date, so say I use F4f, it will show F2 with the F4f BIOS file date.

I guess with this board we skipped a lot of the issues the other 680I boards have, but have a couple new bugs to work out.

i came across this thread while googling an identical problem. however...

i am using a ga-m57sli-s4 with an athlon64 x2 4400+ cpu. i do have raided 36gb raptors on this system along with a number of wd storage drives. i did not have this problem when this was my gaming rig in another case, but the issue reared it's ugly head when i switched cases and began using it as a htpc, along with many usb peripherals.

my problem is identical.

i am confounded by this problem quite frankly, i have done quite a bit of research and have found no solutions. i have not flashed the bios on this board yet since the problem was not existant prior to the case swap.

just my 2c, any ideas are appreciated

 

[chansigrilian]

i know some other folks have this problem... any help is appreciated.

 

[chansigrilian]

halp

is there a better forum category? where else should i seek help?

 

[TriXstaH]

Hello chansigrilian,

I hope you're still recieving messages from this thread, cus i've got similar problems as described in your thread...

I'll start at the beginning. Recently i assembled a new system composed of :

Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 (Rev 2.0)
AMD Athlon 64 3800+ X2 "EE" (windsor core)
MSI NX7300GT
Mushkin EM-PC6400 DDR2 (2x512)
Samsung 160 GB SATA (RAID0)

I installed all the components in the case and connected everything. Then I pushed the power button and immediatly got an error message ( something to do with the processor), but it booted , jippy. I installed windows and noticed every reboot was accompanied with POST beep codes (two beeps , mobo error) . So i rechecked every plug and confirmed everything was connected properly. Everything worked but....

Every now and then there were sudden shut downs, building DMI pool data........Flash Rom protected messages and POST beep codes. I was considering sending the mobo off for RMA, but i wanted to try one last thing : Clearing the CMOS. So i did this , and like magic all problems were solved . Atleast i thought so.

Later on i noticed one of the IDE HDD's had crashed and i had to recover all the lost data. No biggy, the drive still worked and i got my data back and subsequently reformatted the drive. But then was something strange going on. In the bootup screen it said my IDE drive was classified as LRG instead of LBA. (never heard of this , but what the heck it worked) Also every reboot was accompanied with a "verifying DMI pool data ..............Update success !" message. now this is strange considering i had not changed anything in the hardware configuration. So i thought maybe the drive is defect and i unplugged the IDE cable to see if this would change anything . Well , without counting the first reboot, it seemed the problem was solved, but then the "Builing DMI pool............Flash rom protected" message resurfaced again.

So i set out to find the some more info on the subject and landed in this thread. All these errors are driving me crazy and i was wondering i you could help me to some more information on the probable causes, or how you solved your situation.

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

 

[travisray2004]

This sounds like a motherboard problem. You might want to see if there is any bios updates for it, and if not, check with Gigabyte and see if they have a lot of these problems. Maybe the dmi is working right because of IRQ's i can not really tell. You may have PCI/AGP/PCIe cards plugged in and taking up other devices irq/dmi settings.

 

[TriXstaH]

Hello,

Thank you for your reply.

You may be right about a mixup in the dmi/irq settings, however , i flashed the bios with a new rom (thats FB for the rev 2.0) and selected the "clear DMI pool" option to go with the flash, also afterwards i cleared the CMOS and loaded optimized defaults. Then everything seems ok until i reboot a few times.

Furthermore if there is a conflict in the IRQ resources assigments then surely windows device manager should indicate this, and i never saw anthing of the sort.

So i'm guessing there is something wrong with either the mobo, Bios or Battery. but im not sure which one it is. One other thing i noticed was the strange mounting holes layout of the mobo. When installed , the bottom part (thats where the SATA connectors are) bends when installing cables and memory and stuff . So perhaps because of this one of the circuits on the pcb is damaged. But im not sure , cus if there was, probably the whole mobo wouldnt work.

 

[travisray2004]

It could be a grounding issue, but most of the time, the screen wouldn't even turn off., Be sure that all mounts/holes have a screw in them and is nice and tight to the case. This may not fix the issue, but could prevent other issues.