Gadgetory

what's up guys JC cents here and I was working on a video about bottle necking but I was getting blocked by an issue that was causing me a bunch of problems that I finally figured out and I figured this would make a good opportunity to do another one of those troubleshooting teaching videos where actually show you guys how to get around some problems that might otherwise have seemed to be pointing at one issue when it turns out to be something entirely different the new dg7 series case is from EVGA off a PC enthusiast more of what they love like tempered glass side panels vertical GPU mount integrated RGB control board DG tuner and an awesome three year warranty to learn more about the DG seven series of cases from EVGA head to the link in the description below so my setup here is an 8700 K in an ASUS Maximus X apex board I've been running this for a while with a Titan X obviously like I said we're going for some bottlenecking stuff and I I've been having a very strange issue the same SSD and the same Western Digital black hard drive I have been using forever started to give me some problems and I'll show you guys what those problems are but first I just want to explain the problem and then I'll demonstrate it for you be a data i think it's an sx 900 SSD I have in here is quite a few years old it has been used a lot didn't get any sort of smart errors but I started getting complete system lock ups on responses and then the drive would drop off from the BIOS detection entirely leading me to believe that it was a bad SSD but upon switching the SSD and the problem persisting thought that maybe it was a bad SATA cable turns out that wasn't the problem either because now I've got three different static cables that I've used two different drives and the problem persisting now I've got everything working fine for the moment and just to show you here's my Samsung Evo 850 or a 50 ebo 500 gigabyte SSD and then my Western Digital black showing up just fine so we're gonna go ahead and go into the OS and I'm gonna show you in real time what happens because it is extremely easy to recreate so this is one of my disc images that I use for my testing things like blender and Cinebench and all that as you can see everything is working fine let's go ahead and load up something like Cinebench something that is gonna start to sort of stress our system a little bit here so if I could just go ahead and run my CPU test see the moment I hit run No oh there goes see how that kind of took a minute and then it started to go these are the these are the telltale signs that something wasn't right when I've been using this system long enough now to know when something isn't right what if we go ahead and do something like oh I don't know it's launched MSI Afterburner let's place some farcry I need to download this driver though and the problem has now started I just tried to install the latest driver for Far Cry 5 as you can see we've got a little spinning wheel it's thinking I told it agreeing continue nothing's happening nothing's happening in control of Billy Joel shift escape we saw the moving cursor we have not hard locked or anything like that but our OS is completely unresponsive I can't close windows nothing so now this is the part where it gets interesting and this is why I'm making this video because someone might start to think at this point especially if they're in inexperienced with computer hardware or troubleshoot hardware's computer hardware's more than one of them this is where troubleshooting and experience really starts to come in because somebody who's new to this world might have started to think they have a bad installation or even a bad disk let me show you why because now if I just hit reset on here because we have no choice but to do a hard cycle of power on this when we come back up you will see that it will take us straight to our BIOS because now the computer is not going to see any sort of boot drive remember our SSD is our boot drive so now if we go over here to see my first thought now is somebody who's dealt with this a million times is ok sometimes a BIOS will change the boot order it's rare but it does indeed happen and because I have to but storage drives on here I have a standard hard drive which is used for all my game files and mass size files so I'm not filling up my SSD and may SSD is my OS if you go over here to the boot tab you can see now only the Western Digital is showing up if I go into the boot ride override on the left again the Western Digital is showing up now part of troubleshooting at this point would be to try another cable or make sure you're getting power to the SSD and I've already done all of that I'm gonna spare you guys me watching me do all that in this video but that's what I would do next I would make sure the cables plugged in all the way I would make sure that power is plugged in all the way and because I do know power works considering the hard drive is using the same pigtail as the SSD I do know that there's power in fact we were just using it so no here's what we're gonna do we're gonna go ahead and clear the CMOS even though we were running all optimized defaults no overclocks no anything we are going to go ahead and clear the CMOS and I'm gonna show you that clearing the CMOS actually brings it back but I've also repeated this test a good 10 times today and just using the PC normal within a few minutes it will give you the exact same result we're gonna talk about why and we're going to also talk about how to fix it so most asus boards have this green clear CMOS button on the back I'm gonna hold this for 10 seconds you're gonna to check with your motherboard menu a manual to see where your clear CMOS is every motherboard has a clear CMOS this is basically forcing it to revert to its out-of-the-box settings it's gonna clear any sort of stored memory in the BIOS now since we cleared the CMOS it forces us back into the BIOS to check all of our settings make sure that they're correct if we go to boot look what's magically back our Samsung 850 Evo so that tells me it's not a bad Drive it tells me it's not a bad cable it tells me it's something wrong with the actual motherboard BIOS itself now here's what we're gonna go ahead and do we are going to go ahead and update our BIOS on the motherboard I have a theory I have used this set up now for months without a problem ever since coffee Lake has launched I have used this CPU and this motherboard in this configuration without any problems what has changed is recently there were some Windows updates that were actually causing problems on Intel SSDs now this is not an intel SSD but i do believe that our problem is going to be somewhat related the fact that I can even get it back is actually a good thing unfortunately my SX 900 a data SSD which I've been using for this test bench now has a corrupt installation on it though because of the when it failed it did something catastrophic and now windows needs to try and restore that installation but updating your BIOS is one of those things that I typically tend to go with if it ain't broke don't fix it because there's a lot of things that could potentially go wrong with updating your BIOS a sudden power loss your dog trips over the power cord your significant other or your kid trips over the power cord in the middle of flashing which can brick your board again fortunately asus has BIOS flashback features which don't even need a CPU RAM or anything plugged into it but that is that that is an asus feature so if you're not using an asus board chances are you could end up breaking it so we're gonna do now is we are gonna go ahead and take this flash drive i've installed the latest rom on here on the root of this drive and we're gonna use easy flash to bring it back which should fix our problems asus updates take a little while because it does multiple things each time it restarts so will do multiple restarts again every motherboard is different check with your manufacturer because last thing you want to do is start see now it's doing the BIOS update it was doing the management engine update a second ago yeah so this is you don't want to cut power in between this see it just turn itself off again that would freak you out they know what you're doing but I'm warning you now so you know if it starts doing all these restarts it's normal unless it doesn't stop doing it that's not normal and here's our new revision right here 1301 we were on what 0 2 1 4 or something like that before so if we go into our BIOS we should now obviously see our drive the question is now can we go into Windows and although that we have all kinds of things showing up now and now we're going to kind of do a little gambit of test to make sure it works but the point of this video is sometimes your problem could look like it's one thing but it's something else entirely obviously our problem was not with the SSD this might leave some folks to think that the SSD not showing up and just suddenly dropping off and locking up it's a problem with the SSD or potentially a cable or have you looking at things like power supply and pretty positive the entire issue here was a Windows Update causing a conflict with an old BIOS on this motherboard this was a very old BIOS it's really this was a launched BIOS when copy Lake first came out so as you can see that took us in a completely different direction so where we failed last time was when we tried to install our driver so we're gonna go and try this again and see if it actually makes it through I don't anticipate there being a problem I really don't if the problem persists then I have no idea where to go next to be honest with you but I'm pretty sure the problem will be fixed because it was persistent through different SSDs different cables and different power plug so the only thing that changed from when the problem started until the you know before the problem started was a Windows Update so yeah Jack went up to Microsoft once again all right so it's working obviously we're doing Windows updates now 76% left this is the major update the 1803 I couldn't even get this far before because the drive Kipp miss let's just say disconnecting from the controller in some way but it's all working perfectly fine right now which is a good thing the point of this like I already said sometimes problems look like they can be leading towards one thing when it's something completely else so this is one of those times when I would definitely recommend if you're running an old BIOS definitely update it if you feel comfortable with it please please check the manuals with your motherboards to make sure you're doing it the right way so you don't break your devices I had no choice because obviously the update paths and how many updates old we were or whatever was obviously conflicting with the age of our BIOS with our particular hardware so we had to do this to get it up and running there is that guys I this this literally was an impromptu video because it was stopping me from making the video I was trying to make so we're gonna go ahead and get on with that but if you guys enjoyed today's video won't you give it a like and maybe share it with some of them might be having some sort of a similar issue I hear people all the time tweeting me and emailing me about their system just stopped responding with a little spinning wheel and that's exactly what I was getting right here anyway guys thanks for watching copy Tex coming up next week you guys are not gonna want to miss the coverage on that we're gonna try and give a perspective of Computex not just running around doing the obligatory here's this here's this here's this we want to do more of a an experience for you guys and give you more of a first-hand look of what it's like to experience Computex as a PC enthusiast not just what's at Computex but we're gonna go thanks for watching guys as always we'll see you in the next one