Hi, i just removed a motherboard from the PC i built for my brother about a year ago, with one of the craziest issues i ever encountered. What happened ? 1) his computer completely froze. 2) he turned the whole computer off 3) then he turned it back 4) BIOS logo came up And this is where it froze. I tried to help him through the phone and we ended up with the diagnostic code 78 on the display on the motherboard. EVGA support says this : http://www.evga.com/support/faq/afmviewfaq.aspx?topicid=46&faqid=58950 After removing all USB devices and rechecking the display cables, we were still stuck at code 78. CMOS cleared, same code. So today i checked the computer by myself and what i found out that if we had at least one SATA device connected, POST would stop at that code 78. If i remove all SATA devices, system happily POSTs and greets me with the missing boot drive message. Now maybe you would say it is the hard drive... Except it isnt'. First of all, the POST stops at that spot if any of the hard drives is connected. It stops even if i put in a completely different SSD drive i took from spare parts i had at home. And just to confirm it, i took his boot drive, put it in my spare ITX PC i had with myself (just in case i can't fix the issue, so he will have at least some computer), connected his boot drive and voila, Windows happily booted - it only needed installation of the new chipset (P55->P67) and graphics (HD5870->Intel HD Graphics) drivers. So it's not the drives (they work in other system and my spare drives stop the POST as well) and it's not the cables (3 SATA cables failing at once is next to impossible). By the way, POST prints out the connected drives before it stops, as the POST process is pretty much like "test RAM, detect hard drives, detect USB devices" and here it freezes. A sidenote - other southbridge functionality seems to be working, with hard drives disconnected i had no problem going to BIOS and checking the settings there. I am expecting to receive a spare PSU tomorrow, so i will be able to test out if it is maybe caused by failing PSU (unlikely); i will try to swap the RAM for other too just in case; i will try a different graphics card (GT430 instead of his HD5870) to rule out some slow HD5870 death, but i would like to hear your ideas why could this happen before i start the RMA process - considering it will cost me 25-35€ just to ship the board to Germany i would like to exhaust every other option before choosing RMA.
Well with a different PSU and different graphics the SATA ports work, so system stops for some other reason, but i can't imagine why. Will have to try the board at his computer again to find out if it is the power supply or maybe the graphics card. Really can't imagine anything else causing it right now.
I take back my previous post - it's the board, but in kinda crazy way. Connect all power etc and one thing through SATA connection - it works. Connect second SATA device - it won't finish the POST. Going to write to EVGA support, let's see what will they say to this issue.
Tired it with the secondary bios? I had some weird issue like this once with mine where the bios had become corrupted or something. Switched it to other bios, booted up put jumper back to first bios and flashed latest.
Pretty sure the jumper for bios select is near the sata 4/5 ports. I'm not at home to look at it and it's too hard to see on any of the small photos I can find.
Yeah, found the BIOS_SEL jumper, but swapping it from 2-3 to 1-2 did absolutely nothing, same issue at same spot. I suspect some ugly hardware bug has visited my board and RMA is going to be the only solution.
Defineatly not a good sign, might still be worth trying a bios reflash from dos usb stick if you can get there. But I do have to agree sounds like something more serious is wrong.
For what it's worth, it sounds like the motherboard to me, but I'd be worried as to why it failed. Hopefully it was just a random failure, and wasn't caused by, eg, the PSU frying a component.
