From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

On 7/16/25 5:19 PM, bad sector wrote:

On 7/16/25 11:11 AM, Paul wrote:

On Wed, 7/16/2025 9:34 AM, bad sector wrote:

On 7/16/25 4:44 AM, Paul wrote:

Off for your RMA I guess.

You're never wrong so 'ideally' I should put the board together again
and try the motherboard power-button but all the CPU installation and
removal risks bending the pins so I won't. The board is back in its
box and goes RMA as soon as I get the shipping label. I asked them to
foot the shipping both ways but they'll probably decline, that means
that by the time it leaves here it will already have cost me retail
price + $150 or so + many months of my life and I STILL haven't seen
the NEW and faultless product that I had *PAID* for.

My experience here wasn't flawless either.

My Zen3 build "started in blackness and watching little LEDs",
so I've been through the rough parts of this exercise. And making
mistakes, on "what that LED actually means".

Then, months after the build is finished, I was getting
the weird OS shutdowns (not seen on Linux), which cost me
a small fortune to fault-isolate. The knee jerk reaction,
would have been to send my 5000 series processor for an RMA,
but experience tells me it's not the processor as
they're very reliable as parts go.

So I ended up getting an extra motherboard, testing, finding
the CPU was fine. And then I started fuzzing the config
(shut off RealTek NIC, shut off iGPU, install Nvidia card,
install Intel NIC, finally it settled down). That does not mean
it is "fixed", either. it means I'm allowed to use it.

I think the experience is intended to "build character",
if you know what I mean.

-a-a-a Paul

You're a jewel Paul, but I'll postulate that the character building
effort should target a supply chain that increasingly is dumping
untested more bleeding than edge products on the DIY market trying to
get its members to do their testing and saving them millions before they start volume sales at deep discounts to a different market, one that forgives nothing and goes to court on every opportunity. Take the
example if BIOS, there should hardly ever be a need for upgrades but
instead of this we're getting one almost monthly. Mea-Kurva dammit,
natural selection is doing its thing.

My previous Crosshair-IV board 15 years ago worked all-around out of the
box with a total of maybe 5 BIOS revisions. The only snag was that it
never detected my Durgod keyboard. Had I known the hell facing me with
this proart flash-in-the-pan (with my son's sudden death in the middle
of the episode) I would never have touched it, not even for free!

Latest is: it 'might' be replaced by a new one.

Well it went back on RMA #2 and this time they paid the postage. I
received the report saying 'board does not post, replaced with new one'.
Put it together for the Nth time, again it wouldn't go into BIOS. Tried
the old 'test' ddr5, back and forth for hours absolutely 'fuming'.
Finally got into it and tried to upgrade but it failed (actually didn't
even start, and as said many times before the manual and the BIOS
dialogs are a total disgrace). After another eternity got the
'Crash-Free' BIOS upgrade procedure started and managed to flash in the
latest #1605. On the 1st reboot with this BIOS all previous boot issues
GONE, two 48gb ECC cards booting in a second, no problems at all. WHY
wasn't this the case when I got my first board in December last year?????

But then only windows booted, still can't get into BIOS no matter how
much I press Del or F2 and the previuous workaround of having nothing
bootable (which forced it into BIOS before) is gone too and all I get is
a notice to plug in something bootable. With the disk 'in' windows boots again. Finally I booted the Tumbleweed install DVD and forced a re-grub
by just changing the timeout. Back in business.

Still can't get into BIOS, just like the old Crosshair-IV board. I'm
sorry to say these people obviously have their customers do the BIOS development after a premature product release and they have microcancer
so far up their bazooka they can't tell if it's night or daylight.


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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

On Thu, 7/31/2025 10:48 PM, bad sector wrote:

On 7/16/25 5:19 PM, bad sector wrote:

Latest is: it 'might' be replaced by a new one.

Well it went back on RMA #2 and this time they paid the postage. I received the report saying 'board does not post, replaced with new one'. Put it together for the Nth time, again it wouldn't go into BIOS. Tried the old 'test' ddr5, back and forth for hours absolutely 'fuming'. Finally got into it and tried to upgrade but it failed (actually didn't even start, and as said many times before the manual and the BIOS dialogs are a total disgrace). After another eternity got the 'Crash-Free' BIOS upgrade procedure started and managed to flash in the latest #1605. On the 1st reboot with this BIOS all previous boot issues GONE, two 48gb ECC cards booting in a second, no problems at all. WHY wasn't this the case when I got my first board in December last year?????

But then only windows booted, still can't get into BIOS no matter how much I press Del or F2 and the previuous workaround of having nothing bootable (which forced it into BIOS before) is gone too and all I get is a notice to plug in something bootable. With the disk 'in' windows boots again. Finally I booted the Tumbleweed install DVD and forced a re-grub by just changing the timeout. Back in business.

Still can't get into BIOS, just like the old Crosshair-IV board. I'm sorry to say these people obviously have their customers do the BIOS development after a premature product release and they have microcancer so far up their bazooka they can't tell if it's night or daylight.

"Crazy cool, man". You survived.

It sounds like they really know how to write a BIOS, for sure.

My guess is, the BIOS problems is one of keyboards. Take the machine
across the way for example. Two keyboards. You use the keyboard
that works for the occasion :-)

The guy that "owns a Dell", he has a Microsoft keyboard that he
can't get into the BIOS with either. He has a second keyboard
attached, for that reason as well.

So the idea would be:

1) Your primary keyboard should be the one you do all your typing on.
2) The auxiliary keyboard is for things like BIOS-key-pressing. The
keyboard could be some cheap piece-of-crap, whatever passes for
a keyboard this week at the computer store.

For testing purposes, I've had two keyboards and three mice on the
Test Machine, and it took the OSes over there, quite a few years
before that test case passed. Around 2015, there was "70% detect rate",
and random ones would work or not work. I was never locked out of
the PC, but it was hit and miss on detection. There was a USB mouse,
a PS/2 mouse, and a serial (RS232) mouse.

I'm pretty well out of spare keyboards. I have a beige plastic USB Apple keyboard
as a "spare" (glare off keycaps is awful). And an ancient ADB bus Apple keyboard
and a USB to ADB adapter (a lucky acquisition for sure), and can run that keyboard
on a PC. I'm all out of spare PC-keyboards. I would "stock up", but the selection
of keyboards at the store is "not so good".

But it does sound like you've learned a lot (about RMAs mainly :-) )
and you might have a working computer now. Might. And with ECC, too.
That's something I never got, in my efforts, was a working ECC.
Victory! The staff at Intel are envious, that they've managed to
get another customer set up with ECC... by having AMD as a competitor.

Paul
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

bad sector <forgetski@_INVALID.net> writes:

Still can't get into BIOS, just like the old Crosshair-IV board. I'm
sorry to say these people obviously have their customers do the BIOS development after a premature product release and they have
microcancer so far up their bazooka they can't tell if it's night or daylight.

You can usually put an entry for entering BIOS in the Grub menu, these
days. Like this, for example:

menuentry 'UEFI Firmware Settings' $menuentry_id_option 'uefi-firmware' {
fwsetup
}

Of course, it needs EFI grub, BIOS grub isn't going to know about that.
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

On 8/2/25 7:59 AM, Anssi Saari wrote:

bad sector <forgetski@_INVALID.net> writes:

Still can't get into BIOS, just like the old Crosshair-IV board. I'm
sorry to say these people obviously have their customers do the BIOS
development after a premature product release and they have
microcancer so far up their bazooka they can't tell if it's night or
daylight.

You can usually put an entry for entering BIOS in the Grub menu, these
days. Like this, for example:

menuentry 'UEFI Firmware Settings' $menuentry_id_option 'uefi-firmware' {
fwsetup
}

Of course, it needs EFI grub, BIOS grub isn't going to know about that.

Yes, it's what's saving my butt but I'll put it in my notes anyway for a
rainy day, Tumbleweed does it by default. If it were not for that I
would have been up the proverbial creek. The board just kept booting
windows, until I got fed up with the scam and booted a TW installer into upgrade mode. There all you need do is change the timeout (<c> Carlos)
to get grub code rewritten to disk with no other upset.


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