[ale] new hardware problems

[Cor van Dijk]

Geoffrey wrote:

> Well, got to pick out my father's day gift early.  It's been a pretty 
> big headache ever since. :(  Here's the story:
>
> New Asus a7n8x-e deluxe mb, new matched pair of ddr400 512m corsair 
> memory,  AMD Sempron 3000+ (relatively new, but known to work in 
> another mb). New WD Raptor 36g sata drive.  All assembled in a 
> previously owned Lian-li case.
>
> New bios in the mb, 1013 the latest.
>
> Box begins to boot, but seems to cycle through a couple of reboots 
> without me doing anything.  I say that because you see the monitor led 
> go green, then you hear what appears to be a reboot and the led goes 
> yellow, then green again.  Sometimes it will make it to the 'loading 
> the OS' message, other times I never see anything on the monitor.
>
> It will spontaenously reboot, even when sitting in the bios screen. 
> I've been in the bios, when suddenly the box reboots.  It's not heat 
> related as the mb has monitoring and when I view the temps, they're okay.
>
> The mb manual is of little help as you're not sure what's good/bad. 
> Start's by saying there are 4 memory slots (there are 3).  Then says 
> you can arrange matching dual channel ddr400 sticks in [1,3], [2,3] or 
> [1,2,3].  I've never seen matched sticks in threes...
>
> It says you can use single-channel ddr400 one stick in any one of the 
> slots.  I have tried this, with three different sticks of ddr400, 
> still can not get a successful boot.
>
> Any suggestions as to what this might be would be greatly appreciated. 
> Bad mb or memory I guess, but I don't even want to consider swapping 
> the board out.  I've got other ddr400 memory, but it's not 'paired.'  
> I've tried it as well, but no luck.  I've gotten as far as actually 
> getting into the install when SuSE was loading the drive, but that 
> suddenly rebooted as well.
>
> I guess I mostly suspect the mb, but what a pita to have to replace 
> this thing now. :(
>
I had somewhat similar problems with my ASUS P4800SE mobo last year. The 
problem went away when the "IDE configuration" -> "Onboard IDE Operate 
Mode" in the BIOS was changed to "Compatible" (it was "Enhanced"). Cor 
van Dijk