Help with Threadripper Taichi and NVME boot drive

Hello I am mainly a lurker on this thread

but was wondering if I could get some advice. Some back story on my situation. I recently had the Gigabyte Designare motherboard and it worked great, but then one day it failed. Not sure what happened maybe a power surge since whenever I tried to power it on it made a buzzing sound and the LEDs just flickered on and off. I RMA’d it back to Newegg (after Gigabyte gave me a hard time) and they sent me one but it had visible damage to the RAM slots. Instead of going and dealing with it I purchased the x399 Taichi.

I updated to the latest BIOS and only 3 of my 4 RAM sticks are showing up. This was solved by reverting to an older BIOS (2.30 to be exact). My main issue is that my NVME boot drive doesn’t get recognized and it gives me the following error when I attempt to boot up (attached). I tried installing Ubuntu on it but it isn’t recognized by the installer.

I read that re seating the CPU helps… Does anyone else have any suggestions? Should I return it and get a different motherboard? or stick it out and grab a 2950x?

Thanks in advance!
#helpdesk

Do you have CSM disabled in the bios, and the board in uefi mode? I believe that is typically required. Also drives with previous mbr/gpt sections and partitions can be a clusterfuck in both windows and linux to deal with until you use whatever special command line tools available to force a solution. Just today I used “sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M” to clear an ssd so I could install windows on it. Windows could see the disk and creat partitions, but couldn’t install on it. Strangely, my installed MX17 (debian) install couldn’t deal with it, because of some recursive error or something, though the live USB of MX17 allowed me to finally blank the drive.
BIOS/UEFI/MBR/GPT/GRUB and the whole damn bootloading sequence is a fucking blackbox I have never understood and only just barely fumble my way through.

For the ram, are you certain that the sticks are in the correct slots? I know this trips a lot of people up. Also try reseating all the sticks even if they are correctly placed. If that doesn’t work, take out all sticks and only use 1 at a time and see if they all work.

I’m on 3.30 with a 2950X and everything works fine for me and I’m running with every RAM slot populated (128 GBs). Not sure if this is a bios issue though. Did you install your RAM in the right slots for 4? I remember when I was bringing my system up and doing some troubleshooting that it wasn’t exactly intuitive and also it was easy for me to have a loose DIMM in the slot.

Thank for the suggestions. Currently I have tried switching each of the quad channel configs
and in both cases one stick was not recognized. I tried the beta bios (I think 3.23E) and it did not work at all either. I upped the RAM voltage to 1.35V, but it still did not work. One thing I will try is to loosen the timings once I get back from work.

My exact RAM is the Team Dark Pro 3200 (TDPGD416G3200HC14ADC01). I verified that it was Samsung B-Die and it worked flawlessly in the Designare. I also read some people had got it to full speed on the x399 Taichi. I know its not on memory QVL, but other people have gotten it to work. Not sure if its luck of the draw or I got a bad board.

Log, I will try and blank the drive with a live distro. Is there a difference between MX17 linux and Ubuntu Live distros?

Did you try each stick individually to rule out that it’s not just one stick that’s having issues?
What’s confusing about your issue is that you said an earlier bios works fine with them. You may consider contacting Asrock about the issue, though I’m completely uncertain how helpful they’ll be. They also have a forum you can post to: http://forum.asrock.com/default.asp

edit I also forgot about this: http://forum.asrock.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=6615&title=important-windows-10-information-for-x399-users
Try disabling IOMMU as well.

So I just tried all the sticks and they each work individually. Its when I try all 4 it goes crazy. I just tried two sticks on the left side of the CPU (C and D Channels) and I was able to get the XMP profile to work right away. I tried one stick only in the A channel and I get a 16 error code which is either CPU or Memory. I am going to try and reseat the CPU and see what happens.

So the A channel seems to not be working. I reseated the CPU and tried all the RAM modules in those two slots and it does not seemed to be recognized under the 3.30 bios.

Hey Log,

I tried booting into a live Ubuntu USB and check on a single NVME. It was filled with dev/loop partitions. I am not sure if my fedora install got corrupted or what. Could the motherboard be reading the NVME wrong? or is it a formatting/linux issue?

Unfortunately that’s beyond my understanding. If you don’t need anything off of it, I’d just blank it.

Thanks for y’all s input. I updated the BIOS and the NVME booted. I ended up RMAing the board since the memory channel never worked.

I would like to ask some advice. Is it wise to wait and see the new MB’s coming out for Threadripper 2? Or just get the Designare again? Eventually I would like to upgrade to the 2950X from my 1900X an I am not too sure if the new sets of MB’s will have some of the kinks worked out of them.

I haven’t really heard of any more boards due for release – the next round may be tied to Zen 2.