What would you do in my situation?

[AMDGuy]

You guys have always given solid advice so I figure to ask what you guys would do in my situation.

I have a LGA 1156 system with a Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3R motherboard, i5-750 chip, and 2x2GB OCZ PC3 10666 memory. I had the system OC'd from it's base of 2.66Ghz to 3.4Ghz and it's been running pretty much trouble free for 3.5 years. I leave it on all the time, never powering it down except to reboot for patching. It has been connected to an APC UPS with surge protection to keep it stable.

I went to check e-mail yesterday morning and the monitor would not wake up from being asleep with mouse or keyboard input. I noticed the numlock didn't work so I checked the system and saw the HDD LED lit solid, so I knew it had locked up for some reason. We had storms the previous evening.

I tried the power button on the front, no dice. I had to turn off the PSU. When I tried to power the system back on...nothing. No lights, no fans, no nothing. Pulled the PSU and bench tested it with a MM and with pins 15 and 16 jumpered it fired right up and all voltages were all within spec. I removed all components from the board except memory and cpu, and still no dice. Not even a single LED. Then I removed the ram and cpu as a final step, still nothing.

So now I have a 4 year old system that appears to have a failed motherboard. It was plenty fast for everything I needed it to do so I have had no plans for an upgrade. I'm 4 years out of the loop on technology and don't even know what is good these days.

I've tried to find a similar board to replace mine with and am surprised at prices still over $100 for these. I did find some 1155s but my processor will not work on them. Based on what I'm seeing, the new stuff isn't that much faster than what I had anyway.

My drives were raid1 arrays in the system. So I'll have to get the data off of them unless I can find a board that they will just plug back in to.

So if you're in my shoes and don't game or anything, what do you do at this point? The most taxing thing I do on the system is occasional HD video editing and some PhotoShop work.

Thanks in advance.

 

[EarthDog]

Buy that $100 s1156 mobo would be my move...

 

[madhatter256]

Without CPU/RAM, the motherboard will have no response, this is normal with most boards I have worked with... If I were you I would test that RAM. OCZ doesn't make RAM anymore for a reason...

 

[EarthDog]

OCZ doesn't make RAM anymore for a reason...

What does making no profit have to do with this?

 

[madhatter256]

What does making no profit have to do with this?

Their reliability issues

 

[AMDGuy]

I thought when there were memory issues the board would give error code beeps. I know this one did if you had them in the wrong slots and what not.

I took it to a local computer shop and they feel it's the board as well. He said there's a VERY slim chance it's the processor, but he said they're actually pretty robust.

It's been a long time since I researched systems, but he reminded me that this 1156 setup was actually the "upgrade" to the 1155. Funny that the 1155 is still offered and the 1156 is discontinued

I found an ASUS P7P55D-E LX on Ebay for $89.99 with free shipping out of OH. Says it's a NIB OEM board. I need to read up on the specs but that seems like a possible quick and dirty solution that won't cost me a bundle.

Sad thing is the guy at the shop confirmed that what's out today isn't really any faster than what I had. I guess hardware has finally out done most software. So building a completely new system wouldn't be much of an "upgrade" for me.

 

[dostov]

It's been a long time since I researched systems, but he reminded me that this 1156 setup was actually the "upgrade" to the 1155. Funny that the 1155 is still offered and the 1156 is discontinued

No. The 1156 was introduced in 2009. The 1155 was introduced in 2011.

Either he's confused or he knows nothing about PCs, which would be very frightening for a computer shop guy (unless you went to Best Buy, then it's normal). LOL

I'd go with a replacement board also.

 

[AMDGuy]

No. The 1156 was introduced in 2009. The 1155 was introduced in 2011.

Either he's confused or he knows nothing about PCs, which would be very frightening for a computer shop guy (unless you went to Best Buy, then it's normal). LOL

I'd go with a replacement board also.

Thanks for the clarification. It's a pretty reputable shop but the guy did admit to being an AMD fan so maybe he's more familiar with their gear.

 

[madhatter256]

In my experience, there have been many times where RAM goes bad without giving you error codes or beeps.

But yeah, unless you are an avid gamer, the LGA1156 platform will do you well a couple of more years.

 

[AMDGuy]

Well, I couldn't find anyone with a LGA 1156 board for me to test the memory on, so I just ordered the Ebay Asus P7P55D-E LX. I picked up an 8GB Corsair Vengeance kit just in case the OCZ memory did in fact bite the dust. I'll try the memory in my current board first and if it's still dead, I'll build the system with the new board and see how the drives react when I plug them in. I'm curious how the RAID will work out when plugged in to the new motherboard.

I thought about picking up a SSD drive for the OS and programs, since I'll likely have to reload the system. Then keep a couple big SATA drives in a RAID1 for my data.

 

[wingman99]

Post back how it all works out.

 

[AMDGuy]

Will do.

 

[AMDGuy]

OK quick update and need of some help. All my parts showed up. Good news is that I was able to confirm it was in fact the motherboard that took a dump. I'd hoped these things would have more than a 3 yr service life for what they cost but it is what it is. I put my new memory in the old board and still got nothing on power on.

Put my old stuff in the new board and it fired right up.

SO, I've now put in my old memory, new memory, new video card, old processor, heat sink, etc on the new board. I have it up and running. FYI, my old OCZ 1333 memory and my new Corsair Vengeance memory seem to be playing together just fine in this new board as I now see 12GB of RAM.

Now for the question:

My OS was installed on a RAID1 array. I've determined which of the drives correspond to that data and plugged them in to the new board. I've enabled RAID in the BIOS and the RAID BIOS sees the array and shows it as healthy during boot. However I get a "please insert bootable media" error after POST. I've even tried to manually boot directly from the two drives by hitting F8 at boot and selecting the RAID array from the boot menu.

I did build a standalone drive with Win7 64 and plugged my OS RAID drives in and they are readable and I can get my data, so no worries there. However, if there's a way to make my original OS drives work with this new board it would save me loads of time and I could plan an outage after making sure I have everything off of them and re-install.

Original board was a Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3R
New board is an Asus ASUS P7P55D-E LX

They appear to use the same Intel RAID controller best I can tell.

Anyone been through this that can offer some advice? Seems to me if it recognizes the RAID there's no reason it shouldn't boot from it.

I did try to boot from the Win7 Ultimate disc and do a repair. It does not find any Win7 installation to repair, so it's something at a lower level not being recognized.

Help?

 

[wingman99]

Do you have the boot order correct?

 

[Mod-R]

What you need to do, my friend, is to install the OS anew. Even if you get this to boot correctly - it isn't surprising at all that it doesn't, the OS is attached to the board, it is usually the only piece you can't upgrade without having to reinstall - you would still have to disable and uninstall all drivers one by one to install the right drivers provided by Asus. As much time consuming, and a thousand times less stable, than a new installation.

 

[AMDGuy]

Do you have the boot order correct?

In the BIOS or the drives? I know it's correct in the BIOS. I can try swapping the drives and check that.

What you need to do, my friend, is to install the OS anew. Even if you get this to boot correctly - it isn't surprising at all that it doesn't, the OS is attached to the board, it is usually the only piece you can't upgrade without having to reinstall - you would still have to disable and uninstall all drivers one by one to install the right drivers provided by Asus. As much time consuming, and a thousand times less stable, than a new installation.

I agree. I'm just trying to get the system up so I can take my time getting the data off rather than having to guess at what's what.

Yes, I screwed up and did not have backups.

 

[Mod-R]

I agree. I'm just trying to get the system up so I can take my time getting the data off rather than having to guess at what's what.

Yes, I screwed up and did not have backups.

Ok then, so you had your user files on the RAID drives too...

Let's see what could make this better.

First, you have to verify that your boot options are in the correct order, as Wingman said, but also, that the SATA options are set to AHCI or RAID. Then try to force the boot onto the drives, by going in the boot menu and manually selecting the disks to boot from.

Second, have you already dropped in the new GPU, and wired your screen to it? If so, and if you have an integrated GPU with the mobo/CPU, then try hooking the screen to it first, and more importantly, remove any power from the GPU in the process.

Come back to us when it's done.

 

[AMDGuy]

Ok then, so you had your user files on the RAID drives too...

Let's see what could make this better.

First, you have to verify that your boot options are in the correct order, as Wingman said, but also, that the SATA options are set to AHCI or RAID. Then try to force the boot onto the drives, by going in the boot menu and manually selecting the disks to boot from.

Second, have you already dropped in the new GPU, and wired your screen to it? If so, and if you have an integrated GPU with the mobo/CPU, then try hooking the screen to it first, and more importantly, remove any power from the GPU in the process.

Come back to us when it's done.

My i5 does not support onboard video, so that's out.

I have tried swapping the OS RAID drives around, no luck. I also tried booting from each one individually with the same "no boot device" error. That seems odd to me as the point of a RAID1 array is that both disks are copies of one another. It's simply like this motherboard is not recognizing these drives as bootable.

I may be out of luck here. I'm a level V sys admin for Windows but have spent my career working with servers. They have specific hardware that only changes once every 3-4 years and is "usually" backward compatible. Makes things much simpler. Desktops, obviously, are much different.

I'm gonna call it a night with fighting this thing. I have two spare 500GB drives I can slap in it tomorrow and get the OS back up. Then I'll dump the data off the original disks and put them away as spares. I had just hoped to avoid having to reconfigure the whole system at this time.

 

[Mod-R]

Well good luck then! If I may be so bold as to give you advice on your system management, I would opt to keep one of the spare drives within the system, and use it to backup all data. You'll still have the other spare to swap in your RAID array if one drive fails, and you'll never have to worry anymore about having to boot from the array if something bad happens. I personally use FreeFileSync to do so with ease, it creates batch jobs for any backup solution you set up, that you can use either as a manual one-click backup by pinning it to your taskbar or desktop, or to set up an automated routine with Task Manager. Just avoid the crapware it will offer along the installation, of course, or use any program you deem is better... At first I did not trust it one bit, but after a month or so of log files perusal and maniacal verification of backed up data integrity, I just let it run by itself. It works incrementally by the way, so after the initial syncing it takes very little time to run, unless you're packing heavy extra stuff everyday. I get to reinstall Windows quite often, as I work in the field and like to test different hardware setup, and I never care about data anymore, my data disk is always independent from the OS, and backed up on yet another drive, and also externally.

Good day!

 

[AMDGuy]

Well good luck then! If I may be so bold as to give you advice on your system management, I would opt to keep one of the spare drives within the system, and use it to backup all data. You'll still have the other spare to swap in your RAID array if one drive fails, and you'll never have to worry anymore about having to boot from the array if something bad happens. I personally use FreeFileSync to do so with ease, it creates batch jobs for any backup solution you set up, that you can use either as a manual one-click backup by pinning it to your taskbar or desktop, or to set up an automated routine with Task Manager. Just avoid the crapware it will offer along the installation, of course, or use any program you deem is better... At first I did not trust it one bit, but after a month or so of log files perusal and maniacal verification of backed up data integrity, I just let it run by itself. It works incrementally by the way, so after the initial syncing it takes very little time to run, unless you're packing heavy extra stuff everyday. I get to reinstall Windows quite often, as I work in the field and like to test different hardware setup, and I never care about data anymore, my data disk is always independent from the OS, and backed up on yet another drive, and also externally.

Good day!

An excellent suggestion. This is exactly what I used to do before RAID made its way to the desktop world. I don't know what I was thinking. For some reason I just never thought the motherboard would fail and trusted the RAID with my data. Oh well, live and learn

I'll check out that program you mentioned. This system actually has 6 drives in it, HD video takes A LOT of space, so I have room to run backups and will do so from now on.

I'm planning to set the new drives up with two partitions. One will have the OS and programs and the other will have my data. That way if something happens again, it's no big deal, just reinstall the OS and progs and move on.