Asus M4A785-M - Level 1 tested

[Joe L.]

I'm having incredibly slow boot times from the USB key, and was wondering if anyone with this board experienced similar issues. It took 12 minutes to load bzroot, on a lexar key from Tom.

 

I've checked the BIOs and it looks like hispeed is enabled. Once unRAID loads it seems to work great, it's just very slow to initially load.

 

Any thoughts?

Hi Speed on your BIOS is probably the slower USB-1 speed.  You might try the other USB speed option available.

 

On my Supermicro MB BIOS Hi Speed = 12Mb/s, Full Speed = 480Mb/s.  (about 40 times faster)

 

I've got mine set to Full-Speed.

 

Joe L.

[expressexcess]

Thanks for the tip, Joe L.

 

I'll check it out next time I have to reboot!

[expressexcess]

According to the BIOs on my board, Full-Speed = 12 Mbps, HiSpeed = 480 Mbps. That being said, I tried toggling the setting to Full-Speed, it took even longer to load bzroot(15 minutes).

 

Even the part where it says "Automatic boot in X seconds" took at least 5 seconds for every second to count down. Any other ideas on what might be causing the extreme slowness? Even the BIOs themselves seem extremely slow and unresponsive (though this is my first experience with BIOs, so I don't know if that part is unusual).

 

What else could this be? The processor I'm using is the AMD Sempron 140--could it be bad? Could it be memory?

[kenoka]

I just got this board to replace my board with the (presumably) bad PCI-E slot. I got everything installed and configured in BIOS, but it's not booting the flash drive. Interestingly, it seems to detect the drive twice: once as a removable, and again as a hard drive.

 

Help!

[mbryanr]

Set the flash to Force FDD

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5642.msg60531#msg60531

[kenoka]

No dice. I just checked the flash drive. I'm not booting from it, but I can at least read its contents. If I end up stuck much longer, I'll have it try to boot another PC.

[kenoka]

Hmm, I also just tried another USB flash drive that has Ubuntu 10.10 on it, and I get the same message: "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key"

[joshpond]

Kenoka

 

What do you see when you load the BIOS.

 

I'm trying to go from memory here but,

 

I know with my ASUS board that if the usb is less than 512mb you have to select the usb and set it as force hdd. I think if it is over it automatically goes to hdd but you can select force hdd for it anyway.

Once you have done that you have to select hard drive for boot priority and then also select the hard drive boot priority so that the USB HDD is first.

 

Josh

[joshpond]

expressexcess

 

Check that the USB port you have it plugged into supports USB2. It should do but not all ports are set.

 

I know with my board 2 ports are usb3 but the rest are usb 2.

 

Josh

[GBH2]

Hmm, I also just tried another USB flash drive that has Ubuntu 10.10 on it, and I get the same message: "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key"

 

Sounds a lot like the trouble I was having with this board.

 

I was never able to get "force-fdd" to work at all.

 

I finally was able to get it to boot to get it to boot using the "USB-HDD" setting.

 

You then have to select the usb drive from the list of hdd'd on the boot page.

 

And then select the the drive as ist in the boot order.

 

What was even stranger was that after changing to USB-HDD the boot drive changes didn't "stick". So I had to reboot and make the boot drive changes again

 

I would suggest try USB-HDD. Then just be patient and make the boot drive selections and disable the other drives and reboot and if it doesn't work keep rebooting and re-checking that the flash drive is listed under hard drives on the boot page (and everything else is disabled) and that it is first in the boot order settings. - I may have left "removable drive" and The actual named flash drive in the boot order - just mentioning it because I am not sure which one did it.

 

Also, mine works fine now but after I added another hard drive and rebooted the mobo "helped me" by making that my boot drive   so i had to go into the bios and go through the process again.

 

Good Luck!

[kenoka]

BIOS options for USB are:

Auto

Floppy

Forced FDD

Hard Drive

 

I have tried auto, Forced FDD and Hard Drive, with the same result.

 

I have made sure my BIOS revision is up to date, and it is. I have tried to boot with no hard drives attached. I have disabled all unnecessary peripherals (audio, serial, parallel).

 

Some quirks:

The flash drive seems to be detected twice. Under "USB Mass Storage Device Configuration", I see two instances of "Sandisk U3 Cruzer Micro 8.02". I wonder if one of them is the U3 device. I'm going to look into how to remove that pesky U3 partition, and see if that helps any. It may be trying to boot from that, rather than the unRAID partition.

 

Under my list of hard drives, position 5 & 6 are taken by USB: Sandisk Cruzer rather than the drives that are actually on the SATA controller. All drives are set to AHCI. Under the main screen, only the first four SATA drives are detected. Even the two drives on the Supermicro SAS card are detected, but not the drives on SATA ports 5&6.

[kenoka]

Okay, I have removed the U3 partition from my flash drive.  It has removed the duplicate device from my USB drive list, but I'm still getting the boot error.

[GBH2]

Okay, I have removed the U3 partition from my flash drive.  It has removed the duplicate device from my USB drive list, but I'm still getting the boot error.

did you try all the options again for usb - Force fdd. hard drive?

[kenoka]

Okay, I tested the flash drive on another system, and it booted straight into the boot menu without issue.

 

I just tried forced fdd again, and I didn't get the message, but I did just get a blinking cursor that never went anywhere.

[GBH2]

Okay, I tested the flash drive on another system, and it booted straight into the boot menu without issue.

 

I just tried forced fdd again, and I didn't get the message, but I did just get a blinking cursor that never went anywhere.

 

I got the "blinking cursor" when the bios reset to boot to one of the hard drives. Reboot again and check the hard drives listed and boot order again.

 

I just went through this last week. I got the board, upgraded the firmware and had the same difficulties you are having.  No matter what I tried i could not seem to get force-fdd to work but I eventually got usb configuration - Hard Drive to work. The bios does not seem to want to let you make all the necessary changes at once. Just set it to Hard drive and keep rebooting until it saves the settings to disable the hard disks and put the flash drive in 1 boot order position.

[kenoka]

What a tremendous pain in the ass. It reminds me of why I switched from Asus to Gigabyte years ago.

[GBH2]

What a tremendous pain in the ass. It reminds me of why I switched from Asus to Gigabyte years ago.

 

Yeah, I wouldn't recommend this board to anyone. I've never had trouble with Gigabyte or even this much trouble with Zotac.

 

I actually got it boot for the first time with Ubuntu - that's how desperate I was getting. Then I rebooted with unRAID on the flash drive ... and nothing .. I had to go back and change the Hard drive priority and boot order both again.

[kenoka]

Yeah, this thing's a bagful of fail. For the love of god, nobody buy this piece of shit.

[kenoka]

I think by now I've tried every possible permutation. I moved the Sandisk to the top of the list of hard drives to boot from. I disabled all the other drives in the list, so the usb is the only one listed. I disabled all other boot devices, except for the usb stick. I went back and tried auto, forced fdd, and hard drive with each combination.

 

I wonder if they've had a bad batch, and both GBH2 and I were caught in it. Obviously someone has successfully loaded unRAID with this mobo.

 

 

[kenoka]

Hmm, I think I may have goofed. I finally gave up and put my old motherboard back in, buttoned everything up, and powered up, only to find that now THIS motherboard wasn't booting either. After getting over my initial paranoid thought that this non booting was somehow catching, I decided that wiping out the U3 partition may have invalidated the syslinux. I reran syslinux, and presto, it booted. Good news, except that it also means that my last several hours of work were probably all done with a non bootable drive, thus invalidating everything I did in that time. Blargh. Back to it tomorrow. If you don't hear from me tomorrow, it's because the Asus booted up on the first try and I shot myself. 

[Blofeld]

Hmm, I think I may have goofed. ... If you don't hear from me tomorrow, it's because the Asus booted up on the first try and I shot myself. 

oh no, don't do it!

Your rig would become orphaned!

[expressexcess]

According to the BIOs on my board, Full-Speed = 12 Mbps, HiSpeed = 480 Mbps. That being said, I tried toggling the setting to Full-Speed, it took even longer to load bzroot(15 minutes).

 

Even the part where it says "Automatic boot in X seconds" took at least 5 seconds for every second to count down. Any other ideas on what might be causing the extreme slowness? Even the BIOs themselves seem extremely slow and unresponsive (though this is my first experience with BIOs, so I don't know if that part is unusual).

 

What else could this be? The processor I'm using is the AMD Sempron 140--could it be bad? Could it be memory?

 

Great news; toggling it BACK to HiSpeed (which it was originally on, I swear) seems to have fixed the issue. It now boots in less than 1 minute. This is fantastic

 

Thank you again Joe L. Without your suggestion to investigate this I wouldn't have stumbled upon the fix.

[kenoka]

Well hallelujah! First successful boot from this system.

 

Final settings:

 

USB settings/USB mass storage: auto

Boot/Boot Devices: Sandisk;disable

Hard Drives: Sandisk;disable

 

Although I was at fault for my last several hours of frustration, Asus has not made the process simple or straightforward at all. This stands in stark contrast to my experience with my Gigabyte board, which booted the first time with no intervention on my part. I know Gigabyte has a tarnished reputation here because of the HPA issue, but to my knowledge they're all coming with HPA disabled by default now, and to my mind their BIOS design is worlds ahead of Asus'.

 

I also found that for whatever reason the boot process on the Gigabyte board was significantly faster than on the Asus. Particularly the booting of the SAS card, which took about twice as long on the Asus as the Gigabyte. That could be the difference in CPUs (Athlon 5200+ on Gigabyte, Sempron 145 on Asus).

 

 

 

[GBH2]

Congratulations!

 

It is interesting that it works for you on "Auto". I have read that others have it working with force-fdd, and as I have said i had to use "hard drive".

 

Slow boot speed surprises me. I am also using a Sempron 145 with this board although I unlocked the other core, my system only takes about 30 seconds from the unRAID/Memtest screen to login prompt - and that is with re-loading unmenu and other various packages. I am using a Patriot Xporter 8Gb drive and my research showed it to be quite fast.

 

I would like to hear back from you in the future when you reboot and add more drives whether or not your settings stay in place or if you have to go back to the bios and set the flash drive as the boot drive again.

 

It's great that you got it working  and best of luck!

[kenoka]

The longest thing is waiting for the Supermicro card to spin up the drives, but that takes twice as long as it did on the Gigabyte board.

 

I'll be sure to report back if the Asus BIOS "helps" me.