Booting problems with AsRock z77 Extreme 4

Hi there!

I've just built my new system (AsRock z77 Extreme 4, i5-3570k, Asus GTX 660 Ti, SSD Crucial m-4, 4x4gb kingston vengenance DDR3 1600). The first time booted the system entered into the bios (v. 1.2) and everything seemed to work fine. Everything was detected correctly by the bios and no issues was appearing.

I've rebooted and since then everytime I reboot the system enters the bios (no matter which key i'm pressing, e.g. F11 for boot menu). Most of the times the bios itself has problems; everytime that i enter in a menu to change something it goes out immediately (like if there is a key always pressed). The strange thing is that it doesn't do it always! Dr. Debug is stuck to A3 & A6.

Another weird thing is that sometimes it works and I managed to select the option to boot from external dvd reader to install windows. When it mangaes to go over the bios stops with black screen and the dr. debug does not give any sign of life. Other times gives a buzzing dash on black screen with A3 or A6.

If I clear the CMOS sometimes restart working normally (it enters the bios and I have access to all options) but from the second boot the problems starts again. Once, after a CMOS clearing, the system managed to boot onto the DVD but after the first screen windows file loading the screen went black and dr. debug was death. After 5 minutes in front of the black screen I shut down the PC and the problems on the bios reappeared!

Any ideas?

Is it possible that the problem is my very old dinovo logitech keyboard?

It could be the keyboard, I would try swapping that out first.

Beyond that, disconnect everything that is non-essential, including the hard drive, and try booting. (ie: you should have only the psu, cpu, video card, memory and swapped keyboard plugged in)

Also pull out all of the memory modules and try all four modules one at a time. One of them may be bad.

If the behavior is the same for all of those tests, then I suspect the board is bad. The behavior you described does not sound like a bad psu or video card. It could be a bad cpu, but those are far rarer than a bad board. You might be able to fix it by reflashing the bios. However, doing so also might make it not work (not work as in not boot at all). The chances of the reflash failing are significantly higher if something is wrong with the board too, so you may just want to RMA it.

It was the stupid keyboard. Thank you for the help