REIV Boot Lag

[JudgmentJay]

Hello all,

I have a Rampage IV Extreme running on BIOS 3101, and I have an issue when rebooting.

For roughly 20 seconds I get a black screen with nothing but a cursor blinking in the upper left hand corner before the BIOS does anything.

This ONLY happens when rebooting and it ONLY happens when the SATA mode is set to RAID. If I boot the PC up cold or if I boot/reboot it in a non-RAID SATA mode this delay does not happen.

This did not happen when I built the PC... it started a couple months ago. I updated to BIOS version 3101 about a month or so ago in hopes that would fix the problem, but it didn't.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[Evantaur]

dodgy ssd/hdd?

[CrazyNutz]

I had something very much the same happen recently. Turned out one of my ssd's in the array had bad blocks.
You might want to try HDtune's error scan to see if it finds any bad blocks.

[JudgmentJay]

Thanks for the advice. I ran HD Tune's error scan on my SSD raid array and it didn't detect any bad blocks, but my PC bluescreened when I was scanning my mechanical drives. This PC never bluescreens and should be rock solid... could this indicate a bad mechanical drive? I'm re-scanning the HDDs now. When it finishes I'll try rebooting with them disconnected and see if it makes a difference.

[CrazyNutz]

could this indicate a bad mechanical drive?

It could be. I would definitely try disconnecting it to see if it solves the problem.

[JudgmentJay]

Well my PC bluescreened again during the scan, so I disconnected both mechanical drives and the bootup lag was gone. I tried plugging them back in 1 at a time, but the lag happened regardless of which drive was plugged in. Somehow I don't think both drives are defective. I also tried switching them to different SATA ports, but no luck.