On 12/17/2018 1:07 PM, Char Jackson wrote:
On Mon, 17 Dec 2018 12:05:11 -0800, mike wrote:

Standard debugging procedu
Divide the system into two pieces.
Test each individually.
Divide busted part into two pieces.
Test each individually.
Divide busted part...you get the point.

Right, standard troubleshooting procedures, except in a case like this
you can't very well do that, so what I've tried to do is more of a
substitution approach. I've tried two different PSUs, two (identical)
motherboards, varying numbers of RAM modules in varying slots, two
different SATA HDDs, two different SATA cables, and two different
operating systems on two different media (USB and DVD, total of 4
combos). I don't have another CPU to drop in, but I'm hesitant to think
that's the issue, and I haven't tried a different optical drive,
keyboard, or mouse. I did try a PCIe graphics card to make sure it
wasn't somehow related to the onboard video, but that didn't help.

Does the drive boot in a different system?

I don't really expect it to, but I haven't tried. The only other system
available at the moment is an older AMD-based PC, so that's pretty
different from what I'm working on. Let me think about that.

I've found linux to be very resilient when swapping drives between systems.
Often have driver issues, but the systems almost always boot and mostly
work.

The other side of the coin is that I've seen several linux distros that
run fine from the live DVD, but won't run when installed. I don't
remember seeing
a boot loop though. Maybe try another distro. I've had issues with
linux mint beyond 17.

Windows 10 has shown to be very flexible when swapping hard drives
around, except for activation, which you don't really need anyway.
Might be worth cloning a win10 system to the drive and see if it boots.


Does a working drive boot in this system?
rinse/repeat...

I'll give it a try, thanks. I expect it to blue screen, but that assumes
that it gets farther into the boot process than what I have now, so it
could indicate something.

Another issue I've had recently relates to partition alignment.
I had old drives that were formatted with 32Kbyte partition offset.
I installed a new win10 OS without letting windows reformat the drive as
I'd done dozens of times in the past.
Well, win10 v1809 assumed 1MB aligned partitions and refused to install.
Win10 V17xx installed without
complaint, but wouldn't boot.

FWIW, there's a lot of settings in the BIOS/UEFI

True, but so far I'm not seeing anything on the ASRock forums about the
defaults being unbootable. Lots of people talking about OC, but I'm not
trying to do that. Thanks for the suggestions.

I've had issues when the boot order defined in the BIOS is incorrect.
Some systems just skip missing drives in the boot order.
Others hang waiting for the drive.
Others give up and reboot without continuing down the list.

I assume there's a hotkey that lets you select the boot
device and you've tried that.

I put PLOP boot manager on a thumb drive and use that to select the boot
device when the BIOS doesn't
have a boot hotkey.

Another possibility.
Do you have any USB devices?
I've had issues where the system refuses to boot if
there's a non bootable USB thumb drive plugged in.
Unlikely, but if you have USB keyboard/mouse, maybe
that's an issue. Worth a look when you run out of options.