Gigabyte DSQ-965p woes

[paxophobe]

Whoops title should read DQ6-965p... :-X

I just purchased this board off of ebay. I am upgrading from a DS3-p965 board (which has been perfect in every respect)...

Immediately my system began to hang when I transfered motherboards. I didn't want to format my system because my DS3 was so similar in just about every way. Chipset, audio, lan were all the same drivers. Regardless, after about 10 BSOD's I decided it was time to format.

Formatting went well, no problems. I installed the system and it was running for about 4 hours without problems.

After about 4 hours I decided I wanted to install Rivatuner. The install crashed half way through. I went to program files to delete the Riva folder and got a popup box stating the folder was corrupted and could not be deleted. Well, I set "checkdisc" to run during startup and it fixed the Riva folder. When I booted back in I was able to delete it.

So I tried Riva again, and this time I got it to install. I want to overclock so I reboot to get the timings. When I get back, the system freezes at the desktop. After 30 seconds the screen goes black.

I booted into safe mode and deleted all my startup entries and went back. Same problem. Freeze then blank screen.

So, I began to suspect that my trusty harddrive of 2 years had suddenly failed coincidently with the installation of my new motherboard. A sad event indeed! I decided to pop in a trusty boot disc for diagnostics.

I ran two programs, HDD Regenerator and Spinrite, both of which check for bad cylinders. Well, both failed after 1% and froze the system up.

Distraught, I was about to pop in my backup drive. After an hour of deliberating (half reading a book to get my mind off the events that were taking place), I had an idea to swap SATA ports. I took the harddrive out of SATA0 and plugged it into I think SATA5 (the top purple port which I believe is a Jmicron)...

Well, I ran Spinrite again and this time it completed with ZERO cylinder errors. Windows booted fine.

I could have just left the sata cable connected in the purple port, but, nooo, I had to know the truth. I plugged it back into SATA0 again, the "faulty" port, and lo and behold. Spinrite completes successfully with zero errors and Windows boots fine.

In completely unreleated news I noticed during reboots my BIOS would switch from F7 to F12 and back and forth. Rather disturbed my this, too.

I am wondering if anyone thinks I have a faulty board or if it's my harddrive. Currently I am _really_ desiring to just put my DS3 back together and tell the guy I bought the DQ6 to give me my money back. I know it's still possible the board is alright but the fact that I've had so many weird lockups, well, I don't know. It could have been Riva, or that I didn't format initially, or that my harddrive was bad... But all these problems started with the DQ6, and I've only had it two days.

My suspicion is there's some sort of fault with the SATA controller. It's too soon to say, but, am definitely eying it. It's too coincidental for my harddrive to fail right with the installation of a new board. Plus, the cylinder errors just magically disapeared by plugging the SATA cable into a new port? Come on, that doesn't fix a harddrive. To me, it seems obvious there was some sort of transfer error, either the cable or the port itself and not the harddrive.

However, this suspicion is highly skewed. BSOD's and not formatting with a new board are pretty common I would imagine. I've had it happen before. And, my harddrive coruption happened twice with Riva. Maybe I should test to see if Riva corrupts it again. Even then, I would suspect the SATA controller, because I would guess that quite a lot of people use RIVA tuner successfully each day.

A little confused. Thanks for any input.

[Lsdmeasap]

Well I am not sure what to say. Have you flashed the BIOS at all? I believe in 965P-DQ6 you can also save/adjust/change the Quad Backup BIOS that is in there so you would be able to make both F12 or one F11 and one F12 if you like. That would fix that issue.

The rivatuner mess sounds like it is not working with your card or system drivers. Have you tried ATItool instead (Yes it works for Nvidia). Or set rivatuner not to run at startup for sure. Since you mentioned startup, not sure what you meant by deleted everything?

Since you bought it on ebay I would think you may have gotten a damaged board. If I was you I would either return it for a refund or keep it and just do not use the damaged port

[paxophobe]

@Lsdmeasap

Thank you for your reply. I formatted again and haven't had any weird problems. It may have something to do with Rivatuner, afterall.

However, today I'm tackling a whole new issue. My dvd drive is stuck in PIO mode and, albeit I have updated to the F12 BIOS, I can't seem to get it sorted.

Do you have any experience with this?

[Lsdmeasap]

Ahh good to hear it. Hmm PIO mode eh, I found you some links at least, but I personally have never had the issue so I have no direct knowledge on how to help in my own words >>>>
Journal of Useful Tips - » How to fix CD / DVD drive stuck in PIO mode

Troubleshooting: Enabling/Checking DMA in Windows Vista, XP, 2000, Me, 9x - Club CDFreaks - Knowledge is Power

drive stuck in PIO mode - Club CDFreaks - Knowledge is Power

WinXP : Dvd-Rom changed from DMA to PIO Mode. Stuck! Help! - CDROM-Guide forums

Good luck, and post back if you do not get it and I will dig deeper

[paxophobe]

Well I had read anecdotal reports of people fixing it by installing the Jmicron driver. Actually, I found this to be false. For me it was as simple as unplugging the IDE cable and plugging it in on the slave connector. Windows reinstalled it as UltraDMA. Unplugging it and immediately plugging it back in on master didn't work. Nor did uninstalling it windows. I also tried setting it all to AHCI or RAID and that didn't help. I first was able to get it to UltraDMA after installing the jmicron. I noticed poor performance still. I tried to uninstall the Jmicron by setting the IDE channel back to standard IDE in device manager, but it was still poor performance. I decided to try and "acronis" back to a state before any jmicron drivers were installed. I did my slave trick again, got it to UltraDMA, and then everythings worked fine. I used DVD playback as a means to figure out if everything was okay. Only once I had gotten it to ultraDMA without a jmicron install did things finally smooth out. =) Looks like my original problem had to do with RivaTuner corrupting my harddrive somehow. I guess its possible, and likely, since both times I had corruption and blue screens happened immediately after installing Riva. Not sure why this is, but I'll try a different tool to get my temps/overclock. Thanks.

[Lsdmeasap]

Good to hear you got it all squared away

Ya, That or try a older or newer version of RivaTuner. Like I said ATItool works for nvidia as well. There is also a few others, if you would like me to hunt them down for you let me know