K7S5A major reset problem

[TBC]

I just received this board yesterday. It was fine at first until I discovered it will not reboot from a reset (either pushing the case reset button, or doing a reset inside of WindowsXP).

It will hang right after the WindowsXP boot menu when it goes to load XP. And it ONLY does this after doing a reset. If I remove the plug from the wall, then plug the computer back it, it is fine. If I do a reset again, it will lock up.

This is not good, as many programs reset your computer to install themself. Not counting installing XP in the first place.

One other thing I discovered, is that when I do a memtest on my Nanya DDR memory chips, they are fine. But if I do a memtest after a reset, its nothing but a constant stream of errors. 100% errors.

If I can't fix this I will have to send it back to newegg. And either exhchange it or get a different brand. Not sure I want to risk exchanging it for the same brand.

 

[Duvie]

I had some issues like that when I was installing on a win98 system with the ecs...win98 and the board did not like working with acpi enabled in bios...I am not sure if this is related as I had no acpi issues when I upgraded to winme...

I have always had the same ram and it restarts like a charm in winme, win98se, and win98fe (with acpi disabled at installation)...IMportant I found is do not change this setting in bios without a fresh install as it will cause failed bootup...Reinstall it with it off and no problems...

what processor are you running with???

I am wondering if it is bad ram anyways or possibly the power supply voltage is not right to the ddr dimms...Bad ram will cause the system to coorupt files and thus have issues rebooting...I think it like flushes itself clean as it is restarting or shutting down and there if the info gets corrupted could be an issue...

Try turning the ram settings to safe or normal and turn it to cas 2.5 or 3t...

Check voltage measurements...look at the 3.3volt rail...

 

[TBC]

I am only using a Duron 1ghz cpu in this motherboard. This was a fresh install too. Although I didn't do an install with ACPI turned off.

I'm beginning to think its the motherboard being defective, as its apparently not reseting the ram correctly.

The case is the one posted in the hotdeals forum. The Evercase sold on newegg.com.

I may try installing the latest bios, provided I can find a way to get to DOS to do it.

 

[Duvie]

To get into dos....do it the same way you would have to run memtest...use bootup disk or place winxp cd in cd-rom drive and tell bios to boot up first off of the cd-rom...If it is like win98 it will give option to take you to a command prompt...


< I'm beginning to think its the motherboard being defective, as its apparently not reseting the ram correctly.
>

What brand is the memory?? I know you said it is running nanya chips...

Check those voltages...some have had issues with stability and such because the voltages being supplied to the ram slots was inefficient...This was usually more seen with 2 sticks of pc133 being used...Are you using multiple sticks and have slots full??? If so remove one for the time being...

 

[TBC]

The memory just says Nanya on all the chips. And was listed as Nanya DDR when I purchased it. I have 2 256meg sticks. (Nanya makes the stick I believe, as it has the same part number as on their web page). And have tried each seperately also.

I did manage to fix the problem. If I go to the bios and change my DDR ram speed from what it was at 100mhz, to 133mhz, then the computer resets without any problems. Apparently it likes the higher speed. (have to keep the cpu speed at 100mhz otherwise it doesn't boot)

However that has caused another problem. Now I have random lockups in Windows that I didn't have before... and that happens after installing the Nvidia drivers for my Geforce3 card.

 

[Duvie]

That ddr should have always been running at 133...with the bios setting since you have the duron being 100/133...pc1600 ddr-ram is for 100mhz speed.

However it should have worked fine but may have been quirky cause it was recognizing it as something different....


I can't ell you anything on the nvidia driver...

Make sure during your installs you leave the memory at safe or normal...avoid tweaking until os is up and running and successfully restarted and rebooted...