Weirdness. Dying motherboard?

[Herb]

Short story: I think my Old P55A-UD3 is dying. Booting in verbose I see this before it restarts:" AppleUSBHostPort ::resetGated: retrying enumeration in 100ms" Then it keeps trying over and over before shutting down.

Long list of symptoms below.

My Hack was running really well since upgrading to El Cap. I did have some occasional restarts, mainly within a minute of the desktop appearing, but I considered it no big deal. I also had intermittent USB disconnects. Again no big deal. Then three days ago things were hanging. I restarted. Since then, my machine shuts down at 3/4 of the boot up progress bar.

In the recent months I had upgraded from a GTX260 to a GTX 750 Ti. Ran great. A week ago I got a GTX 970. That ran great too. The restart occurrence didn't seem to change with either new card.

I panicked, thinking that the GTX970 was taxing my old 600W PSU. I bought a new Seasonic Gold 1250. Still shuts down. The weird thing is that each time I start the machine up, certain USB ports sporadically do not work. One start I can select option in Clover with the wired PC keyboard. Next start, that port stops working. Same goes for thumb drive. Have to move it between starts.

Thoughts?

 

[tonymacx86]

Are you using a DSDT in your setup? If not, USB fix may be necessary. Check out 5 series USB fix here:

http://www.tonymacx86.com/general-h...sb-fixes-os-x-10-11-el-capitan-reference.html

 

[Herb]

Hey there!

I am using a DSDT.

Also, to clarify, the USB weirdness is also happening when I'm in BIOS and the boot menu too. So pre Clover, pre Mac

It's so weird that this started happening now. No software updates, no new software. The only newish things were the new graphics cards. Both worked great., though I was having the occasional reboot.

 

[tonymacx86]

Hey there!

I am using a DSDT.

Also, to clarify, the USB weirdness is also happening when I'm in BIOS and the boot menu too. So pre Clover, pre Mac

It's so weird that this started happening now. No software updates, no new software. The only newish things were the new graphics cards. Both worked great., though I was having the occasional reboot.

Maybe the BIOS got corrupted with all of the swapping in and out? You could try reflashing or simply resetting the BIOS.

 

[Herb]

Thanks. I will give it a try.

Not holding out hope, though because I just smelled a little electrical burning and saw a tiny puff of smoke...

So I don't know what to do if redoing the bios doesn't work.

I already have an Asus X99 Deluxe / 6 core system sitting in my Newegg cart. Should I pull the trigger?

Or am I better off going quad core and saving the money? I need to get back up and running soon. Videos to edit.

 

[Herb]

Could it be graphics card related?

Adding nv_disable=1 lets me boot from my Unibeast thumb drive, but not from my SSD boot drive.

If the card were bad, I wouldn't be able to see the desktop on the the Unibeast boot, right?

Update:

I decided to try to run Disk Utility from the Unibeast thumb drive. Guess what? None of my USB ports work. So I can't do anything via keyboard; wired or wireless. To make matters weirder, I was able to to boot an external Yosemite backup, but all the USB ports again were dead.

 

[tonymacx86]

Could it be graphics card related?

Adding nv_disable=1 lets me boot from my Unibeast thumb drive, but not from my SSD boot drive.

If the card were bad, I wouldn't be able to see the desktop on the the Unibeast boot, right?

Both cards definitely need alternate NVIDIA graphics drivers.

 

[Herb]

Tony, you've been great, I don't think I've been really clear.

I had been having random reboots for a while. Then I got the GTX 750 Ti. Ran great. Still the odd reboot. Sold it and and got a three week old used GTX 970. It also ran great for about a week. Still the occasional reboot. Then I had some quirkiness one day. Rebooted to see if that would fix it. Machine then started shutting down during boot.

Booting from Unibeast with nv_disable=1 allowed me to see Install OS X window, but all USB ports dead. I used the thumb drive to select my Yosemite backup. It booted to the user login, but again USB was dead.

Both my El Cap boot and backup shutdown via SATA or connected externally to USB. I was hoping that maybe my SATA was damaged. Then I'd know it was my motherboard.

I could see how a bad video card might shutdown my system on boot, but I don't know how it would display bios screens and Unibeast and Yosemite stuff.

At some point during this process I smelled burning and saw a puff of smoke.

Where should I go from here? I need to get back up an running.

At this point I can:

RMA the used GTX 970, not knowing if it's the issue.

Find a motherboard that's compatible with my i7 860 and RAM.

Upgrade to a good modern quad and motherboard.

Splurge and get a X99 Deluxe and 6 core CPU.

Thoughts? I need to do something ASAP.