I’ve got a couple of system builds in the works, but I ran into an interesting problem that I thought I’d share. This is a lesson about paying attention to the POST messages, or maybe looking at that BIOS setup screen a little more closely. Those messages actually do show useful information on occasion.
Frustration Ensues
I’d recently started building a system based on the Intel Core i7 920 “D” stepping. The D stepping is known to be highly overclockable, and I thought it would be entertaining to build a small, but pretty powerful system, around an overclocked Core i7 920.
I’ll go over the system build details later this week. But the one unfamiliar component I was using is the eVGA X58 SLI Micro, a micro ATX board built around the X58 chipset. I’d been using an eVGA full size X58 board, so felt comfortable using the micro ATX version – but still, it wasn’t something I’d used before.
I was building the system to replace an aging Core 2 Duo system that had been one of the Friday Night Follies LAN party rigs. I was planning on installing Windows Vista Home Premium, in anticipation of the Windows 7 upgrades I’d pre-ordered for $50 a few weeks ago.
So I build the system. Everything goes well, and the system cruises through the power-on self-test without any apparent hitches. I hit the DEL key in order to bring up the BIOS setup.
I get distracted, because one of the two hard drives I’d configured into the system was apparently defective – I see a “SATA Drive Failure” error on POST. I swear a little, swap out the drive (a pretty beat up Western Digital 640GB drive), and reboot, and go back into BIOS setup.
As I usually do, I configure the BIOS so the system will boot from the optical drive. I discover a downside to the eVGA BIOS – it’s pretty sparse, and it’s difficult to figure out how to set the system up to use AHCI on the hard drives, so I leave them in IDE mode.
Finally, I pop in the Windows Vista Home Premium DVD and boot into Windows setup. Everything goes well, then suddenly I see a blue screen, with the following error:
IRQ_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL
This error is followed by some verbiage asking me to uninstall any new hardware or software I may have installed.
I ante up the blue screen error with a few blue words of my own choosing. The entire system is new, and there’s no software installed, so this particular error message is singularly useless for troubleshooting. It occurs to me that maybe the DVD is dirty, so I wash it with warm soap and water, dry it off and reboot.
Same thing.
IRQ_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL
Now I’m thinking: bad motherboard. Bad, bad motherboard.
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5 comments
Joel says:
September 28, 2009 at 12:35 pm (UTC -7 )
Loyd, you are rarely wrong. Don’t be hard on yourself–you are an encyclopedia of computer knowledge that I can only dream to be.
James says:
September 28, 2009 at 1:03 pm (UTC -7 )
You know you’re going struggle at some point when the likes of Loyd has these sorts of problems!
KikassAssassin says:
September 28, 2009 at 1:21 pm (UTC -7 )
“I’ve installed a Kingston 6GB memory kit. It’s not any 6GB memory kit, it’s a kit rated at 2,000MHz. It should be golden.”
This memory kit doesn’t use Elpida Hyper ICs, does it? There was a problem reported recently where high-speed memory modules using those chips were failing in droves, and some memory manufacturers recalled all of their modules that used them. I haven’t heard if the problem had been resolved or if there are still modules using those ICs on the market, but it might be worth looking into.
Scott Gardner says:
September 28, 2009 at 2:20 pm (UTC -7 )
Loyd, I’m glad you tracked it down. I’ve become a little more cynical about memory lately, since I’ve had a few failures — including a stick in my daughter’s machine that had been working fine for a couple of years. The machine was behaving strangely, and my first instinct is to blame software. However, I finally started doing tests and found the failing DDR2 DIMM. I think memory has to become one of the first things we suspect of problems.
Scott
John Gregory says:
October 1, 2009 at 10:37 am (UTC -7 )
Reports of these kinds of problems that true pros face provide some comfort to the rest of us. Like everybody who reads this blog, I have faced what appear to be insurmountable problems. I usually end up blaming myself. I didn’t do x, y or z. I inadvertently failed to ground myself, whatever. When we read about problems like this, however, we realize that, sometimes, it’s just faulty equipment or software that is to blame.