New SATA DVD-RW burner -- Hangs at Verifying DMI pool data

[mfenn]

OMG, I decided before doing anything I would retest the hang at POST for both drives. I have the revision DU still in there and it actually booted. Don't know why, I'd just this morning reverted to the original F14 mobo BIOS. Gotta go for a while, but will come back and test with the other drive. I have NOT flashed either burner.

Edit: What I'm thinking is that the mbrfix.exe function coupled with reverting to the original F14 mobo BIOS is what did it. That's all I can think.

Reboot and power cycle a few times to make sure it's not a fluke!

 

[Muse]

That is very possible. Glad it's working, let's hope it stays that way.

Ominous words...

Reboot and power cycle a few times to make sure it's not a fluke!

Fluke indeed! Now I can't get past Cerberus at the Gates of the DMI Pool. :twisted:

bbhaag you have PM!

 

[Smoove910]

I'd be close to using one of these at this point :

 

[Muse]

I'd be close to using one of these at this point :

Uh, right. In fact I just PM'd bbhaag asking him to send me the IDE burner he offered. I can be very persistent in trying to fix computer problems but sometimes you just have to admit defeat. I'm there.

Edit: Actually, I guess I can try one more thing, being to ID which of the two new Lite-on burners I want to keep (version C or D), and update its BIOS (I've downloaded the update utilities) and try one more time to get past the DMI Pool. I suppose that's worth a try, figure it isn't likely to brick the burner.

 

[Ketchup]

OK, this is getting crazy. Wanna try a different approach?

Here's my idea:

Make a partition on one of your other hard drives for a Windows XP install. Then go for a fresh install on that. The goal being to limit the number of possibilities of where the problem lies.

 

[Muse]

OK, this is getting crazy. Wanna try a different approach?

Here's my idea:

Make a partition on one of your other hard drives for a Windows XP install. Then go for a fresh install on that. The goal being to limit the number of possibilities of where the problem lies.

OK, actually this isn't a bad idea. I have been booting to either of two XP partitions on my 120GB IDE drive from the beginning. I was thinking "why not use one of the lesser used HDs, I'd be less apt to have a failure. The 160GB drive is seldom used in comparison. I'll install one or two XP's there. I discovered yesterday that my XP install disks are no good, so I'm going to need to get one.

 

[bbhaag]

A just sent a long wordy PM. Please read it all and let me know if you are still interested.

 

[Raincity]

I got to give you props on this one. After one day of bios flashes and everything else. I would have thrown in the towel and ordered a H61/Pentium G combo and a PCI IDE controller card from NE and called it a day.

 

[Jawadali]

This might be a long shot, but is the behavior different if you unplug the USB Hard drive before booting?

I've seen some weirdness with booting with USB drives/peripherals plugged in.

 

[Ketchup]

Any updates Muse?

 

[tcsenter]

Hey, Muse. You may get a kick out of this. Remember those Computer Geeks deals on the bulk/OEM MSI motherboards? You bought the one based on NForce3 and it crapped out on you. I still have the K8N Neo3 boards based on NF4-4x with PCI Express X16 and the AGP/AGR slot. Still in the box, never used!

 

[Muse]

This might be a long shot, but is the behavior different if you unplug the USB Hard drive before booting?

I've seen some weirdness with booting with USB drives/peripherals plugged in.

I can't reboot right now but will within the next few hours and report back.

 

[Muse]

Hey, Muse. You may get a kick out of this. Remember those Computer Geeks deals on the bulk/OEM MSI motherboards? You bought the one based on NForce3 and it crapped out on you. I still have the K8N Neo3 boards based on NF4-4x with PCI Express X16 and the AGP/AGR slot. Still in the box, never used!

You remembered that? I had to do some detective work to make out what you're talking about here. I have info stashed in my data. Here's the thread:

MSI S754 NF3-250 and NF4-4x ATX Mainboards @ Geeks.com in the Hot Deals Forum.

The last post in that thread is post #74 (3-10-2008, 12:52 PM), and it goes like this:

Well, my Nforce3 mobo, the one geeks.com was offering per this thread died last week. It's a MSI nforce3 250 motherboard K8N Neo-FSR/ V V2.0.

First it killed my video card (BFG AGP 6600 OC ) and then just died. I thought it was the PSU, so I put in my other PSU and that PSU died in a second, giving off a strong smell of burned electronics. I called MSI and they tell me it is an OEM board and they don't extend support. I'm on hold now with geeks.com over a half hour, but I doubt they will do a thing.

I guess I'll be looking for another MB, one with several PCI slots, and hopefully onboard LAN and onboard modem would be nice. Also SATA support. Also it would be nice if it supported my socket 754 AMD Venice 2.2 GHz CPU.

Is it this same motherboard you have? A different one, right? I don't believe that the one I had (the thread, I guess) had PCI-Express, or am I wrong?

Obviously, the Gigabyte mobo I'm using right now is the one I bought to replace the MSI that killed my PSU and video card. I ordered the Gigabyte 1 week after the above quoted post.

The PCI-Express slot on that board... I've never used one. Could be used for a graphics card?

 

[tcsenter]

You remembered that? I had to do some detective work to make out what you're talking about here.

I remembered the thread but not which board you bought, I had to check the thread myself. The boards I have are the K8N Neo3 2.0, which have a PCI Express x16 slot for graphics cards (and also that funky AGP/AGR slot).

 

[Muse]

I remembered the thread but not which board you bought, I had to check the thread myself. The boards I have are the K8N Neo3 2.0, which have a PCI Express x16 slot for graphics cards (and also that funky AGP/AGR slot).

Are your boards different from the one I had? It was a MSI nforce3 250 motherboard K8N Neo-FSR/ V V2.0. I long ago got rid of it, it killed a graphics card and a PSU! AFAIK, that board didn't have a PCI-Express slot.

 

[Muse]

This might be a long shot, but is the behavior different if you unplug the USB Hard drive before booting?

I've seen some weirdness with booting with USB drives/peripherals plugged in.

I tried with the USB HD and the USB hub unattached. Still hung. Then I disconnected both of the cables from the COM ports, made no difference. I do have a KVM switch attached that I use to switch the keyboard and mouse usage from my main system to my backup desktop. I guess I could try unattaching that and see if that makes a difference.

 

[Ketchup]

Did you get a chance to try an install with another disc yet?

 

[tcsenter]

Are your boards different from the one I had? It was a MSI nforce3 250 motherboard K8N Neo-FSR/ V V2.0. I long ago got rid of it, it killed a graphics card and a PSU! AFAIK, that board didn't have a PCI-Express slot.

Yeah, different board and chipset (NF4 instead of NF3).

 

[Muse]

Did you get a chance to try an install with another disc yet?

Yeah. My boot drive is a 120GB IDE, it's the primary master. It's divided into 3 partitions, two 30GB partitions on which I have separate WinXP installs, and a 60GB data partition. A day or two ago I installed XP on the first partition of a different IDE drive, a 160GB. The partition had been FAT32, not really big enough, so I used Partition Magic to expand it from ~12GB to 30GB and installed XP SP2 on it. It became the default XP install on the machine, there being 3 at this point. The file system at this point was NTFS, obviously the Windows XP installation changed the file system from FAT32 automatically. I then turned off the machine, attached the burner, tried to POST and got the usual hang. I then detached the data cable from the burner, booted to my preferred XP install and again made it my default boot, going in the My Computer/Advanced screen.

I believe that bbhaag's old IDE burner is on its way to me USPS. Meantime, I'm OK. I have a DVD burner in one of my laptops, plus I have a couple of CDRW drives, even a DVD-ROM drive that will work in the desktop should I need them. One of the CDRW drives is a Lite-on 48x that sounds so incredibly nasty I never used it. I used to use my 24x Lite-on CDRW instead! Once I got my NEC 2510A DVD burner, I never had any need for the other drives, but I did leave the 24x CDRW drive in my other desktop. Unfortunately, the NEC burner crapped out on me the last couple months, starting this whole saga. Alas, I'll hopefully get another motherboard soon, maybe something pretty modern and upgradeable. I do need some legacy stuff, maybe a COM port and a couple of PCI slots minimum.

 

[Ketchup]

Edited, read my next post.

 

[Ketchup]

Wait a sec, I have a question: What did you do the latest install with? The point of this re-install was to perform it with and IDE hard drive AND the new SATA burner installed, in order to write the correct MBR.

 

[bbhaag]

Yeah. My boot drive is a 120GB IDE, it's the primary master. It's divided into 3 partitions, two 30GB partitions on which I have separate WinXP installs, and a 60GB data partition. A day or two ago I installed XP on the first partition of a different IDE drive, a 160GB. The partition had been FAT32, not really big enough, so I used Partition Magic to expand it from ~12GB to 30GB and installed XP SP2 on it. It became the default XP install on the machine, there being 3 at this point. The file system at this point was NTFS, obviously the Windows XP installation changed the file system from FAT32 automatically. I then turned off the machine, attached the burner, tried to POST and got the usual hang. I then detached the data cable from the burner, booted to my preferred XP install and again made it my default boot, going in the My Computer/Advanced screen.

I believe that bbhaag's old IDE burner is on its way to me USPS. Meantime, I'm OK. I have a DVD burner in one of my laptops, plus I have a couple of CDRW drives, even a DVD-ROM drive that will work in the desktop should I need them. One of the CDRW drives is a Lite-on 48x that sounds so incredibly nasty I never used it. I used to use my 24x Lite-on CDRW instead! Once I got my NEC 2510A DVD burner, I never had any need for the other drives, but I did leave the 24x CDRW drive in my other desktop. Unfortunately, the NEC burner crapped out on me the last couple months, starting this whole saga. Alas, I'll hopefully get another motherboard soon, maybe something pretty modern and upgradeable. I do need some legacy stuff, maybe a COM port and a couple of PCI slots minimum.

Yes it is. Shipped it out Saturday morning via parcel post. ETA according to the guy behind the counter was this Friday.

 

[mfenn]

Wait a sec, I have a question: What did you do the latest install with? The point of this re-install was to perform it with and IDE hard drive AND the new SATA burner installed, in order to write the correct MBR.

I don't really see what the MBR has to do with this. It sounds like the system is hanging during POST, thus never even getting to a bootloader.

 

[Ketchup]

I don't really see what the MBR has to do with this. It sounds like the system is hanging during POST, thus never even getting to a bootloader.

Maybe this site will help:

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000474.htm

 

[mfenn]

Maybe this site will help:

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000474.htm

A bad bootloader does not fit the symptoms that the OP is seeing.

• If the system was unable to find a bootloader, it would say so.
• If the bootloader had parts missing, you would get an error like "NTLDR is missing".
• If the bootloader was corrupt, then the OP would not be able to boot at all, even with the SATA drive unplugged.