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Issue with Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe - freezing

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Diablo2424

Registered
Joined
Oct 16, 2002
Location
NJ
I've had this board running without issue for a few years until the other day, Windows froze and upon reboot I haven't been able to get the system to stay running without freezing for more than 10 minutes.

My most recent setup:
Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe BIOS 5001
AMD Phenom II x4 940BE
CPU water cooling loop (EK Supreme HF)
2x 2GB Corsair XMS DDR2
2x 2GB G.Skill DDR2 (After adding this RAM I had to run in forced Unganged mode or else Windows wouldn't boot (when set to Ganged/Auto) which I thought was weird, but a friend gave it to me so I figured 4GB for free- why not!)
Asus nVidia GTX 560
1x Seagate SATA II 750GB 7200RPM
4x WD RE3 500GB SATA 7200RPM - RAID 0+1
1x Lite-on SATA DVD-RW
Antec Earthwatts 750W

At first I had a feeling that my Seagate 750GB (2 Partitions - 300GB for Windows / The rest for storage) HDD died, I noticed the PC took a long time to POST then once Windows booted it would almost instantly lock up. So I pulled the G.Skill RAM to eliminate that as a potential issue - same problem. Next I disconnected my RAID array and connected and extra WD RE3 500GB Hard drive, booted into Clonezilla off a USB drive to clone my Windows partition and boot off that drive instead of my Seagate, about %5 into the cloning process Clonezilla error-ed out stating bad sectors on the Seagate drive.

So far it was straight forward - Bad HDD - get a new one and continue with my life. So I pulled the Seagate and booted into Lubuntu Live off a USB drive to get online - after a few minutes THAT froze on me.

Weird, so now I'm thinking maybe it's RAM, I tried all different configurations, tried clearing CMOS multiple times, and no matter what I do the PC keeps freezing. (When running any live Linux Distro - or while trying to install said Linux distro from USB drive to the WD 500GB drive). So for the why not factor I tried ANOTHER drive (a WD 250GB SATA drive I had lying around) and the system STILL freezes. I did a quick Google search found some posts on forums from 2008/2010 other members mentioned bad SATA ports as well as their DVD-RW causing system hangs. So I disconnected my DVD-RW and swapped the WD 250GB to one of the other SATA ports... the PC is STILL freezing when running a Live Linux distro or while installing Linux to the drive.

TL;DR - Nothing changed - PC keeps freezing, thought it was a bad HDD, new HDD(s) still freezing, disconnected all drives except one/swapped RAM around, stillll freezing.

Anyone have any idea's what could be causing this thing to hang? I know it's running cool enough (I've been watching temps in the BIOS - no problems at all with the water loop), and it doesn't look like RAM is the issue, I just left the 2 Corsair sticks in and ram Memtest for over 2 hours wiht 3 passes and no errors or freezing. It's only when I attempted to access the SATA drives does the system freeze.

Almost seems like something on the mother board (SouthBridge maybe?) is acting up....

Thanks in adv.
 
Have you checked the capacitors on the board for bulging as some do when gettting older?

Have you been able to monitor temps at all from within windows?
 
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