HardwareBanter - View Single Post - New system build - reboot loop when attempting to boot from SATA HDD

**Char Jackson** · December 18th 18, 05:22 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt

On Tue, 18 Dec 2018 09:50:44 -0500, wrote:

On Mon, 17 Dec 2018 23:48:05 -0600, Char Jackson
wrote:

On Mon, 17 Dec 2018 23:03:53 -0500, Charlie
wrote:

Have you tried raising the CPU voltage slightly? My ASRock Z270 Extreme
will reboot on startup if the CPU voltage is too low.
It's worth a try although I'm at a loss to understand how it would boot
from a DVD.

Well that was an interesting suggestion. The default setting for vcore
is Auto, which resulted in a vcore voltage of 0.971v. Google seems to
indicate that 1.35v is probably the upper ceiling for the Core i7-8700,
but values of 1.1v to 1.3v are usually selected in order to keep the
heat under control.

Taking somewhat of a chance, I set vcore to Fixed (versus Auto), then
entered a value of 1.1v.

The system booted without issues from the Linux DVD, but it has done
that before. I shut it down and reconnected the SATA HDD, leaving the
optical drive connected, and tried to boot from the HDD. It booted
perfectly! That's the first time it has been able to boot from the HDD.
Now I'm letting it run through some boring routine admin tasks, such as
creating system snapshots, making and suggesting a list of software
packages that could be updated, etc. It's been running from the HDD for
about 3 minutes now, and that's a huge leap forward. [Edit: It's been
running for over 30 minutes and still going. Amazing!]

What are you running for vcore? Also, Fixed or Ratio or ?

In a previous post, I remember saying that I trust the defaults. Grrr...

I have a Asrock-Z170 Extreme6, when I do a bios update, the machine
boots to bios screen then powers down. It restarts in about 15 - 20
seconds and boots normally. What bios is the board booting from? There
is a led next to operational bios. Jumper setting wrong? Sorry if I'm
taking out of my ass...

For the Z390 boards, ASRock does it a little differently now. The board
always boots from the A BIOS. There's no way to select the B BIOS at
all.

There's a set of rules governing the whole dual BIOS thing.

If the A BIOS fails its checksum and the B BIOS is still valid, B is
automatically copied to A and the system tries to boot from A.

When you do a BIOS upgrade or downgrade, (ASRock says both directions
are fully supported), you're always only affecting the A BIOS. I'm
unclear on the details, but either after the upgrade or after the first
boot/shutdown sequence, the system considers A to be valid and it
silently copies A to B.

The reason I think it involves a power cycle is that ASRock warns users
NOT to power down if a BIOS upgrade/downgrade fails. Instead, just leave
everything running and try again. They say if the A BIOS is corrupt and
you do a shutdown, the system is bricked and has to be sent in to be
reflashed.

Bottom line, there's no longer an LED to tell you which BIOS is active
because it's always BIOS A.