For the past couple of days I have been battling getting my new PC upgrade working. I had purchased MSI NF980-G65, AMD 965 Phenom II Black edition quad core 125 W, G.Skill DDR 3 2200 7-10-10-28 memory, hec Zephyr 1000 1000W power supply.
I had also purchased a 2nd identical board and processor plus Corsair DDR3 1600 ram for a friend.

After assembling all my components and inserting my pair of 8800 GT cards my keyboard would not work (Razer Tarantula USB). My Windows Vista business 64-bit install would not boot. It would get stuck on the Microsoft window screen just before it faded in. So the line that reads Microsoft’s Windows would be barely visible.

First thing I did was connect a PS/2 keyboard and that seemed to work okay. I made sure that legacy support for USB was enabled in the BIOS and could not find any settings in the BIOS to enable USB keyboard support on boot. It has been quite a while since I’ve ran into a motherboard that does not by default support a USB keyboard. I believe the last time I express this was back in the AMD K6/Pentium days.

Believing that a new install was necessary I inserted my Windows Vista 64-bit business install CD. In the process of booting the setup it would lock up on a blank black screen. I thought that might be a problem with the CD so rather than using the backup CD I fetched the original but had the same problem. Then I thought maybe the Windows Vista was not properly recognizing the hardware especially since this hardware is fairly now. I went ahead and inserted my original Windows 7 install CD but that also would not start successfully.

At this point I’m thinking each one of these installs and might already configured install of Windows Vista 64 on my hard drive all seem to be getting stock just before graphics get loaded. This could mean that there is a power issue or a problem with the video cards. I disconnected my video cards and used the onboard video  instead but that also had the same exact problems. I disconnected the new power supply and connected my old Antec 650 W power supply but had the same exact problem.

Now thinking maybe there’s a problem with either the memory, processor, or motherboard. Maybe even an issue with one of the drives but this didn’t make sense. I went ahead and swapped out the memory with the memory that I had purchased for my friend (Corsair DDR3) but had the same exact problem. I then went ahead and swapped out the processor with the processor that I had bought from a friend which is identical to the one I had purchased for myself but had the same problem. I swapped the IDE cables to make sure that wasn’t the issue and also try to run the hard drive by itself and the CD-ROM by itself but had the same problems. The hard drive by itself would still get stuck when Microsoft Windows line started to fade in and the Windows setup CD would get stuck on a blank black screen rather than reporting back that there was no hard drive found for the install.

Now I’m convinced it’s got to be the motherboard. This time so I went ahead grabbed the second motherboard that had purchased my friend and installed my processor and my memory. I connected my drive and my CD-ROM. Finally I connected my power supply and guess what. I had the same exact problem.

Now my head is spinning. I’m at my wits. I connect the hard drive by itself and it has the same problem as before. I put in the install CD and have the CD-ROM by itself and it locks up the same place as before. Just for fun I tossed in a Ubuntu Linux live CD and that worked perfectly. I USB keyboard works, sound card worked, desktop loaded, mouse works, I mean everything.

In the process of diagnostics before I had noticed that when loading Windows Vista in safe mode it would get stuck just after it loaded diskcrc. But if there was a problem with the hard drive then why wouldn’t Windows install load from the CD? and if there’s a problem with CD-ROM then why did the us Linux live CD load up perfectly?

Finally as a last-ditch effort I went out and purchased a SATA drive. The system did not detect a SATA drive connected after I installed it. This motherboard has six SATA adapters. In the bios there is only 4 listed. I just happen to connect to SATA number 5 since it was the easiest one to connect to. I reconnected the drive using SATA number 1 and the rest worked fine.

I still cannot make sense out of everything. In between every change made sure that the jumpers on the drives were set up appropriately and the one thing that stuck out was when I had my hard drive connected alongside with the CD-ROM on the same IDE cable it would take a couple of minutes for the post screen to complete. But if either one was connected on its own as a master the post screen would complete and a split second.

I hope there is a update for this motherboard to correct the IDE issues I experienced and enable support for USB keyboard on boot.

More coming as I play with this and get everything working. Its already proving to be tons faster then my old setup but then again considering my old setup was a Athlon 64 4000 single core with 2GB of DDR ram vs the new quad core with DDR3 it should be faster. I was seeing a big CPU bottle neck then which seems to be removed now.