Quite a number of new systems I’ve built have included the P5B Deluxe or P5B Deluxe-WiFi motherboards. After an aggravating experience with a new build today – really out of the ordinary for the hardware – I figured I’d write up my experiences to save other people a potential issue.
Symptoms: When installing Vista x64 on a P5B Deluxe with 4GB RAM, the installation wizard blue screens and fails with a STOP message. I’d initially tried to pin this to the Intel ICH8R storage controller, since this was my first setup running a RAID1-array on a 64-bit OS. Unfortunately, RAID1 is almost necessary for a new home system these days because hard drives do fail, and people don’t like burning 500GB of their personal files to DVD.
However, even after setting the IDE controller to “Compatible” in BIOS, I received different errors – some apparently related to RAM, and the Windows Memory Test on the Vista installation DVD indicated that the machine had hardware issues. I broke out my copy of Memtest86, which found nothing out of the ordinary.
I tweaked the BIOS settings – memory remapping, PECI support – all with no real results or varied blue screen messages.
The solution eventually came to me when I was re-browsing Asus’ download site for BIOS upgrades. As part of all new system builds, I upgrade the BIOS to the latest stable version available. Unfortunately, Asus has two separate pages for these upgrades: one which just indicates “new BIOS releases”, and another page that lets you know which ones are beta versions. One thing you don’t want to do for a stable family system is install a beta BIOS, and any revisions publicly available after April 2007 are considered betas.
I likely wouldn’t have experienced this issue (and indeed proved it) if there was only 2GB of RAM in the system, or I wasn’t using an Intel E6750 1333MHz CPU. So, lesson learned? Make sure you read all the BIOS pages on Asus’ site before downloading and installing one. Currently I’m planning on reverting back to the latest official 1101 version, as opposed to version 1216 which seems to display these issues.
Update: Apparently downgrading your BIOS is a trickier proposition than originally thought. EZ Flash 2 (the built-in flash utility) will not downgrade BIOS versions, so you have to locate a copy of a DOS application called AFUDOS that supports downgrading:
From this application, you’ll need to make a bootable USB stick/CD/floppy with the older BIOS image on it, and then use the command:
AFUDOS /iBIOS.ROM /pbnc /n
where BIOS.ROM is the path to the BIOS file you’d like to flash.
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