Most weirdest problem ever

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TJ99

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So I got my new Core i7-2600K yesterday, but there's a rather big and inexplicable problem with it. (Or a "challenge" as our beloved government would say)

I searched a bit (well, a lot) and found a workaround, that takes ages and lots of effort, but no explanation whatsoever for what causes the problem. Not even speculation. Here is the harrowing tale:

The PC starts up and gets into the UEFI BIOS menu, when there are no SATA drives connected. As soon as I connect a drive to any port, it refuses to go through the POST completely, and just continuously reboots as soon as it gets to the "press DEL to enter setup" screen. Disconnect the drive and it's fine.

My first thought was, problem with the cable. It wasn't, I tried 4 others. Tried 6 different ports (Intel 3Gb, Intel 6Gb and Marvell 6Gb ports). Same story. Tried 4 different drives. Same story.

I then discovered through the magic of Google, one guy had similar problems, and the solution was to just remove all partitions from the drive in another PC. :wtf: It works. The PC will boot normally if you connect blank drives, or one that was first written to with that PC. Hot-swapping doesn't work, even though it's enabled in the BIOS. So I have to put the drives in an external enclosure to get them to work.

I then have to backup a whole drive at a time, (through USB) wipe all partitions (so it shows as "unallocated space"), then connect it to a SATA port, go into Windows and create a new volume, and copy everything back. As you can imagine copying thousands of GB's over a clunky old USB 2 connection takes many many many hours, along with having to find space to temporarily store all the data. I want my drives to just work again.

So, any ideas as to why this is happening? And please don't tell me it's the legendary Sandy Bridge SATA issue. It's got nothing to do with this.

It's an Asus P8P67 Evo board, with the latest firmware from the ASUS website.
 
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Maybe there is something in the MBR that the UEFI doesn't like, or something missing that it is looking for. Not sure why this would be the case, but it is the only thing I can think of.
 
That's what I thought as well, but wouldn't that just mean the drive would be inaccessible until formatted? It shouldn't cause the constant rebooting. Is there a way to keep the data and re-write the MBR? Partition Magic could probably have done it back in the day, but it doesn't work in Windows 7 anymore, or any x64 OS as far as I know.
 
Well, UEFI has a different partition system, GPT, for larger than 2TB disks. So the problem could be that your UEFI is set to EUFI-GPT rather than BIOS-MBR and this is causing the looping. Unfortunately, I just don't know that much about how this stuff.
 
Have you updated the BIOS? There are some anomalies with the boot sequence. One that was supposedly fixed was the 'double post' thing, but it still happens.
 
I thought something along this line as well first. This is my first UEFI system, and the first one I've ever seen in fact. My drives are 500GB, 1TB and 1.5TB though so size isn't the problem. I thought maybe they need to be GPT disks to work, but the first one, an old 250GB which I formatted and installed Windows on, is still showing as MBR, basic disk in Disk Management.

But again, isn't there something like Partition Magic out there for modern systems?
 
TJ99 said:
But again, isn't there something like Partition Magic out there for modern systems?
Click to expand...

Try asking Garyvdh in the software forum. If there is a piece of software that can do something, he will probably know what it is, lol.
 
I presume you've reset the BIOS and changed the boot order to accomodate the drive. Is the drive actually detected (should appear for a millisecond on-screen).
 
Lounger said:
Have you updated the BIOS? There are some anomalies with the boot sequence. One that was supposedly fixed was the 'double post' thing, but it still happens.
Click to expand...

Yes, I did update it, said so in the OP. It still double-POST's sometimes yes.
 
@Rudimental:
I use Parted Magic, since its free & very good, for manipulating partitions.

Perhaps you're also referring to this one?
 
Lounger said:
I presume you've reset the BIOS and changed the boot order to accomodate the drive. Is the drive actually detected (should appear for a millisecond on-screen).
Click to expand...

Can't get into the UEFI menu to change boot options, it reboots before that. And it does it even if there's only 1 drive connected (with data on it)

It doesn't show which drives are detected at startup, only the ones connected to the Marvell SATA controller. (2 ports) And no, the drives don't show up there either. Right after the Marvell's startup screen (which says no drives found), the PC reboots, or sometimes pink, blue and green gibberish is shown on the screen, and when you try to click or press a key, it also reboots.
 
Are you running 1024 BIOS or 1053 Beta version? Try the Beta if you are not using it already.

Also noticed someone else having UEFI issues that was due to unsupported ram. Is you ram in the supported list?
 
ponder said:
Are you running 1024 BIOS or 1053 Beta version? Try the Beta if you are not using it already.

Also noticed someone else having UEFI issues that was due to unsupported ram. Is you ram in the supported list?
Click to expand...

There are lots of Corsair Vengeance modules in the list, but I didn't specifically check for mine. I'm quite sure it's not that though, because there's absolutely no problem with an empty drive, or one that was formatted on this PC. It's definitely to do with the file system on the hd's. I'm running the full 1024 or 1204 or whatever it is, I might try the beta tonight, but I'm not too keen on the idea of beta firmware..
 
TJ99 said:
I'm running the full 1024 or 1204 or whatever it is, I might try the beta tonight, but I'm not too keen on the idea of beta firmware..
Click to expand...

Pfft, sissy :p

If it does not work then simply revert back to 1024. I'm running a beta version for my BIOS.
 
only 1 thing concerns me here, u do know about the sandybridge issue right?

This might potentially have something to do with that, dunno maybe im way off and need to read the whole thread
 
Bedford said:
only 1 thing concerns me here, u do know about the sandybridge issue right?

This might potentially have something to do with that, dunno maybe im way off and need to read the whole thread
Click to expand...

Yep, especially the OP, where I said it's not that :)

That bug only affects the Intel SATA ports, and only the 3Gb ones.
 
ponder said:
Pfft, sissy :p

If it does not work then simply revert back to 1024. I'm running a beta version for my BIOS.
Click to expand...

Yes I could try that, but I've read about so many people bricking their boards from flashing too much. Then again it's a proper ASUS one this time, so it has some sort of recovery mode. Since you're using the same board, did you connect a hard drive with data on it, and did it work? Or did you just install everything from scratch on blank drives?
 
TJ99 said:
Since you're using the same board...
Click to expand...

Where did I say that?

All I said was that I'm running a beta version for my bios, I never said I'm using the same board though. See my signature.
 
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