Serious boot issues

I recently purchased this board and i've had it running a few days then i experienced an issue. I create a new active partition for a linux install. I rebooted and received a cmos checksum error, then cmos was reset. I had to go into the bios and manually activate all my drives as they were unactivated.

So here is where the issue is. Booting takes takes a long time. I had to boot to the Vista DVD to mark Vista partition active again. Booting to a Vista DVD takes about 30 minutes to get to first welcome screen. Another 10 minutes to complete marking the partition active. Now i've rebooted again and the Vista install i have looks like it's going to take an hour to boot to it.

I've had issues from day one with the bios, sometimes the text is scrambled so i'm suspecting the CMOS chip might be faulty. Any suggestions? Could i be missinf something in the bios? Otherwise i'll need to RMA today.

put your system spec.s in sig. so we know what where working with mo. cpu ram so on a bios update maybe in order here who know's
Rich

Sorry about that, fixed now.

I just got off the phone with a tech from Supermicro. His first suggestion was to replace the CMOS battery as only physically resetting the cmos via jumpers or a Bios update would cause that. All i did was reboot. Then he said i may have an incompatible DVD drive. Trouble with that is booting is slow to both the DVD drive or my SATA hard drive.

His final conclusion was to replace the CMOS battery and try running the board on a bench ,out of the case as there may be a short. So i have no idea. All i know is as soon as i got the cmos checksum error my issues started with booting to any type of drive.

need help no video--i have x7dca-l with 2 e5405 and thermaltake cp303 heatsinks 4 gb 667 -pc 5300 registred memory-can somebody help me out

What did you use to create the partition?
Did you actually install Linux to the partition?
Have you tried removing all unnecessary peripherals and boot? ie; 1 drive 1 chip 1 ram

PS. sounds like the tech guy was pretty useless if his only suggestion was the cmos battery.