Weird 30 min boot time, Asus Dominus Extreme when using U.2 drive

Hardware Hub Motherboards
1

Good Day,
I have recently bought a New old stock Asus Dominus Extreme, and have built my new PC around it.
I have a W-3175x, and an Optane P4800x also New, and I have a P5520, When no U.2 drives are plugged in it boots and I can get into the bios within 5-10 seconds, but with a U.2 drive plugged in, it takes 30 min or longer to boot.
When booting it sits on Code : 78 for about 5 min, then Code : 92 for about 5 min, then Says “GPU BIOS” on the I/O Display for about 5-10 min, then says “Detecting HDD” and takes another 15-25 min on that till it boots to windows,
Everything is a fresh install all firmware and bios are up to date.
Anyone got any idea on anything I can try? I may have over looked something with U.2 configuration it is my first time using U.2.

2

  1. Loose cable? Double check the connections.

  2. Weak signaling? Drop PCIe speeds to Gen3, then Gen2, etc.

3

No loose cable, running at Gen3. Crystal Disk mark runs as expected no issues found when the pc is at windows it is just booting that takes ages.

4

Does it only do that with that specific U.2 drive, or is it the same with any U.2 drive?

5

If I unplug both U.2 and boot to bios that works fine in 5-10 seconds
If singular either P5520 or P4800X are plugged in or together either way around on the ports.
Takes about 30 min to boot even to the point of bios (20 min for bios) extra 5 or so to get to windows.

6

It seems unlikely both drives would be bad in this very specific way, and it would be really expensive if the motherboard was the problem, so buying a replacement cable for testing might be worthwhile.

Where did you source your cables from that you are using now?

Edit: re-read your post and you have seemingly ruled out bad cables. Maybe grab a pcie controller to narrow the problem down?

7

I bought the u.2 cables from Amazon, they are link up,
LINKUP - Internal 16G U.2 Cable (85Ω 85ohm PCIe Gen 4 Mini SAS HD to U.2/SFF-8643 to SFF-8639 Cable) with SATA Power - 0.9 meters/3 feet: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories
I have bought extra sets of cables and have had the same issues.

8

How are your u.2 drives formatted? Is there anything weird on there that might confuse your system at boot?

9

He means POST, not the actual booting of the OS. Is a bit confusing cause he talks about POST codes “when booting”…

10

I think I was saying that incorrectly as well. I’m wondering if a corrupted/ incomplete partition table could cause this problem.

11

How would I check for that?

12

If there isn’t anything on those drives that you want to save, I would start by just deleting any existing partitions.

There is definitely a smarter way to do that if you are concerned with preserving the contents of the drives.

13

I reformated and installed windows and did a fresh partition on the other about 4 days ago. I can do it again. Any other things one might try ?

14

Ahh, if you’ve formatted both recently then that’s unlikely to be the problem. Especially if the behavior didn’t change.

15

So upon my testing. Bios 0704, anything lower and it doesn’t recognise the ram I have and anything higher I have 30 min plus boot time.
Not sure why that is, but hey.
My only hiccup now is I can’t get to this forum some SQL issue not sure if it’s my pc or an issue server side.

16

Sorry that was poorly worded, 0704 works and boots normally.
Everything else did not

1 Like
17

So 0704 both boots correctly and recognizes all of your ram?

19

Yea, presumably something they changed for the 800 bios’s and forward for win 11 changed something.

1 Like