New mainboard hangs on Verifying DMI pool data in RAID mode

[Cunjo]

Like the title said...

I just bought a brand new mainboard because the SATA and IDE controllers on the last one went out... it's a Gigabyte GA-EP45C-DS3R/DS3.

I have attached to it:
4x 250GB SATA HDDs
1x 1.5TB HDD
1x Blu-Ray/HD-DVD/DVD-RAM

In legacy/ATA mode, I can boot to a CD and run diagnostics... It passes quicktech with flying colors, passes IBM/Hitashi DFT extended test on all drives, passes memtest.

I put it in RAID mode, build my array back up, and attempt to boot from the XP CD... the BIOS hangs on Verifying DMI pool data.

Yes, I NEED RAID.

I can come up with a few possibilities... the Seagate 1.5 TB drive may need a firmware update, and the mainboard could probably use a BIOS update. However, both of these require me getting Windows working -first-, and I can't do that if it won't boot.

Also I am reluctant to flash the firmware on my seagate drive while it is the only backup of my data that I have, and I will need it to restore my data once I install Windows. Hence, I was planning on transferring it to the array first, then updating, and transferring it back.

Any ideas/suggestions?

 

[philbar71]

do you really need to boot in to windows to flash bios? my board comes with something called qflash that's what i used to falsh my bios.

 

[Cunjo]

Tell me how to use Qflash without a Windows Operating System to apply the bios revision update .exe file.

 

[philbar71]

hmm i cant do it off of the top of my head, consult your manual. my board is pretty much the same so i'll get my manual and look it up for you later.

 

[Cunjo]

yah, manual says you need to obtain the update from the self-extracting .EXE... I finally got a windows-based live CD working on one of my laptops, so now I can do that... will report back and let you know how it goes once I do.

I get an invalid boot record error when attempting to run the q-flash utility.

okay, I got it to flash the BIOS, by creating a bootable DOS floppy, booting into DOS, then swapping the DOS floppy with the BIOS flash utility floppy and running flashspi.exe biosvers.f5 /c /d /r...

Now the BIOS hangs at:
Verifying DMI pool data ......... Update Success!

So we got 2 more words... still hung, still can't boot.

EDIT: did eventually get it up using a Windows install disk, and it doesn't bluescreen this time as long as you smash F6... also had to turn off some of the advanced cpu power management features.