P5K Deluxe Wifi AP Thread.

[dangel]

God came to me in a dream last night and said "replace thy SATA cables my son". So I did. Just now

Here's the thing about my pc - when it's boots, it normally gets to the "press esc to boot" screen and you do and then the screen goes blank with a flashing cursor for like 10 seconds before it boots. Unplug the DVDR drive and replaced the drive cables.. this no longer happens. Interesting! I also have pagedefrag running on every boot so i always see the pre-logon WindowsXP text screen (with the small white winxp logo in the top right) - the xp logo on this was always corrupted but now it's not..
I also just had the no-post screen problem when i plugged the dvdr back in which _seemed_ to go away if i unplugged the DVDR. So I either have a DVDR SATA problem here, or bad cables/connections to drives or both.. I'm going to see if I can get it to crash..

[dangel]

It's... stable



So all i got to do now is some trial and error to figure out whether it was the DVDR killing the system or not. I've got the same drive in another machine and that machine instantly reboots if you burn a CDR but not a DVDR I wouldn't recommend Optiarc drives kids!

[Clunk]

I should have mentioned the cables, they are notoriously bad with the P5K series.

Samsung drives work well, if thats any consolation

[dangel]

lol not really but thanks for the info Doesn't help the cables are right smack where the GTX is.. I could kill asus for that oversight. I'll let you know if i can get it unstable again with just the DVDR back on. Maybe i'll go parallel again

[Clunk]

You can still fit a straight and an angled cable in the top two SATA sockets.

Glad you got it all sorted anyway

[sitalchauhan]

Sorry for bumping a really old thread, but this is an update for this problem myself and many other people were having. Here is my post about the problem from 3 years ago:

http://forums.hexus.net/1135487-post428.html

I can see in this thread that other people have since also been having the problem of the P5K booting up but doesn't Post, and there is no video output to your monitor.

3 years later and I have finally solved this problem.

Basically I am pretty certain this motherboard doesn't like any RAM that uses Micron D9 chips (Crucial ballistix, corsair dominators, geil, g.skill, super talent, Team Xtreem, etc).
I have been using Crucial Ballistix 2x1gb 6400c4 which have Micron D9 chips. As soon as I switched to Corsair 2x1gb 6400c4 v2.1 (which has Promos chips) it now works perfect, boots every time, boots fine from a cold start, etc. If you google this 'P5k No Post/Blank Screen' problem, everybody having the blank screen/no post with the P5K is always using RAM with Micron D9 chips, and then everybody else with the P5K and non-Micron D9 chips are always saying that they are not having these problems at all.


I have been putting up with the blank screen/no post ever since my pc was first built, I don't know why it only just clicked in my head that everybody having this problem has Micron D9 chips in their RAM, I wish I had realised this years ago. My solution for these years was to just leave the PC on 24/7 and never shut it down once it was up and running lol. If there was ever a power cut and the PC refused to post, I would put in a single slower RAM stick (corsair xms2 512mb 5300), go into bios and set all bios settings again to my 3.2Ghz overclock and set everything up (timings etc) for my Crucial Ballistix RAM but change DRAM Voltage to 2.55v. Save and exit, and quickly turn off the psu switch as the PC rebooted after exiting the bios. Then switch the RAM back to my 2x1gb Crucial 6400c4. Turn pc on, enter bios, change DRAM voltage back to 2.2v and then save and exit (do not change or mess around any other settings otherwise it will 'hard reboot' and refuse to post again, but if you only change the DRAM Voltage setting it 'soft reboots') . And the PC would then boot perfectly.

This method worked consistently for about 2 years. Then one time I had a powercut and used this method but the PC refused to POST again. To get it working again I did exactly the same but set DRAM voltage to 2.25v (instead of 2.20v) then it would post. Then a few months later it would only boot when at 2.30v. Eventually last month the PC wouldn't boot unless the voltage was 2.40v. This is when I started reading up about the problem again as I didn't want to run above 2.40v since the RAM was so hot to touch, and this is when it clicked in my head to buy some non-Micron D9 memory!

Hope this helps anybody else that has been putting up with this problem for years, or if anybody is buying a P5K second-hand and encountering this problem