ASRock Questions?

Can anyone suggest a good place to ask questions about an ASRock
motherboard? I don't see an ASRock newsgroup.

I've got problems booting up my desktop. Initially, I thought I had some
kind of USB conflict but on the rare occasions when I've been able to
boot successfully, I got indications that it's not seeing one or another
of my hard drives.


--
Rhino

Rhino wrote:
Can anyone suggest a good place to ask questions about an ASRock
motherboard? I don't see an ASRock newsgroup.

I've got problems booting up my desktop. Initially, I thought I had some
kind of USB conflict but on the rare occasions when I've been able to
boot successfully, I got indications that it's not seeing one or another
of my hard drives.



They're related in some way (Asrock and Asus). But a few
things have happened over the years. Pegatron was spun off.
I don't know if Asrock started under Asus in the beginning.
Pegatron was spun off to handle OEM type stuff (so the Asus
motherboard business wouldn't have conflict of interest with
the OEM side of the business). The Wikipedia articles don't
all contain the same info, but between the three articles,
it looks like this.

Asustek ---X--- Pegatron
\
Asrock

*******

One way to fix a "seeing disks" problem, is to clear
the CMOS. That might be of interest, if the problem was
consistent (same thing missing every time, no changes).
Your problem doesn't exactly match that. So clearing the
CMOS would be further down my list.

If you thought it was an actual disk detection problem,
it could be that Vsb (Southbridge voltage) or something
related is a little low. In which case, you'd measure
and adjust, or you'd just adjust it upward one notch.
When my Northbridge started throwing memory errors one
day, bumping Vnb by one notch stopped that from
happening. Modern motherboards (at least Enthusiast grade),
have a lot more voltage regulators to adjust, and the adjustments
are quite precise.

My my old Nforce2 board, I needed to do a resistor mod,
to bump on of the motherboard voltages. There was no
BIOS adjustment back in those days, for some of the
less-visible voltages.

While some frequency could be radically in error (causing
the SATA cable rate to be wrong), I don't think that happens
very often. And I don't have any way to verify what it might
be either. In the old days, the clockgen manufacturer had a
utility for programming the clockgen, but now, who knows
which clock sets the SATA rate. The clocking is a lot different
than it used to be. More of the clocks come from
the chipset itself.

Paul

On 2013-09-20 8:54 PM, Paul wrote:
Rhino wrote:
Can anyone suggest a good place to ask questions about an ASRock
motherboard? I don't see an ASRock newsgroup.

I've got problems booting up my desktop. Initially, I thought I had
some kind of USB conflict but on the rare occasions when I've been
able to boot successfully, I got indications that it's not seeing one
or another of my hard drives.



They're related in some way (Asrock and Asus). But a few
things have happened over the years. Pegatron was spun off.
I don't know if Asrock started under Asus in the beginning.
Pegatron was spun off to handle OEM type stuff (so the Asus
motherboard business wouldn't have conflict of interest with
the OEM side of the business). The Wikipedia articles don't
all contain the same info, but between the three articles,
it looks like this.

Asustek ---X--- Pegatron
\
Asrock

*******

One way to fix a "seeing disks" problem, is to clear
the CMOS. That might be of interest, if the problem was
consistent (same thing missing every time, no changes).
Your problem doesn't exactly match that. So clearing the
CMOS would be further down my list.

If you thought it was an actual disk detection problem,
it could be that Vsb (Southbridge voltage) or something
related is a little low. In which case, you'd measure
and adjust, or you'd just adjust it upward one notch.
When my Northbridge started throwing memory errors one
day, bumping Vnb by one notch stopped that from
happening. Modern motherboards (at least Enthusiast grade),
have a lot more voltage regulators to adjust, and the adjustments
are quite precise.

My my old Nforce2 board, I needed to do a resistor mod,
to bump on of the motherboard voltages. There was no
BIOS adjustment back in those days, for some of the
less-visible voltages.

While some frequency could be radically in error (causing
the SATA cable rate to be wrong), I don't think that happens
very often. And I don't have any way to verify what it might
be either. In the old days, the clockgen manufacturer had a
utility for programming the clockgen, but now, who knows
which clock sets the SATA rate. The clocking is a lot different
than it used to be. More of the clocks come from
the chipset itself.


Thanks for the suggestions, Paul! As luck would have it, I solved the
problem myself a couple of days after I posted this; I just forgot to
come back and indicate that fact until now.

The problem began immediately after I moved house and shortly after
posting here, it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, something had
gotten slightly dislodged during the jostling of the move. (Not that the
computer got jostled very much.)

Anyway, I opened the case and just checked the seating of the SATA
cables for the three hard drives and the DVD burner. I didn't actually
feel anything that was noticeably loose but one of the connectors MIGHT
have moved a tiny distance as I reseated things. On the next reboot, I
got to the desktop fine. I had initially thought it was a USB conflict
of some kind so I gradually added each device on a separate reboot and
it all worked just fine. Problem solved! My conclusion is that something
was not seated 100% correctly and reseating things fixed the problem.

Also, with regards to that sound problem I was having since replacing
the ASUS mobo with the ASROCK, that is now solved too. I mentioned the
frustration I'd had with the sound to some of the guys helping me move
and one of them came up with a tiny little USB audio device. It sits in
a USB port and has a tiny 1/8" stereo jack for speakers and another for
headphones; I just plugged my speakers into the first of those jacks and
now my audio works fine again. Actually, it's even better than before.
For some reason, I get a lot more bass via this configuration. (Or maybe
the bass control got nudged during the move and THAT's why I have a
bassier sound!)

Thanks again, Paul!

Best regards!


--
Rhino