Faulty ASUS X99-PRO board. Some progress with repair. Need advice\help please.

[jimbodriver]

Hi everyone,
I am trying to learn electronics repair. I purchased a “faulty for spares/repairs” ASUS X99-PRO/ USB 3.1 motherboard for a very low price from ebay – a good enough price to offset the high probability that the board was completely toast and not realistically repairable.
Initial results:
Board would power-cycle when turned on either with switch on board or shorting pwr pins. Fan would spin for a second or so and a QCODE of 00 would display then it would power off and then do the same thing again over and over. I think maybe 2 times in about 100 attempts at powering on it got past the power cycle. When it did this it still did not post to bios (UEFI) and many different, constantly changing QCODES were displayed. In either case no signal was displayed on the monitor.

1: Tried removing RAM sticks, gpu and even cpu but would not get past power-cycling and 00 code.

2: Board has ASUS flashback facility. Downloaded the most recent BIOS from ASUS (version 4101), copied to USB and connected USB to the dedicated flashback USB port and pressed flashback button – seemed to be doing something but not sure if it actually flashed the BIOS. Net result still power-cycling with 00 code.

3: Removed BIOS chip from motherboard and programmed latest BIOS (4101) on to the chip with a CH341a USB BIOS programmer and Neoprogrammer software.

PROGRESS!! But not completely fixed. Need advice/help.

Motherboard will POST into BIOS (UEFI) but ONLY after it has been completely powered down (PSU switched OFF) for a considerable time interval (gonna say 5 minutes but haven't really started timing it too closely).

Some other things to note (not sure if relevant).

The CMOS battery was reading 2.9v both in and out of circuit. Thought this was slightly low so changed it for a new one. No change.

I was initially using a Corsair CX550F RGB power supply. I tried a different psu, OCZ500MXSP, and the board posted more reliably with this despite being an old psu and less power.

If the board is “reset” from within BIOS(UEFI) it will quite happily POST without any problems time after time.

Even after the board has been running in UEFI, if it is shut down with the power button (rather than a reset) and you try to restart from the power button (or short pwr pins) the board will revert to power-cycling and 00 QCODE until it has been completely removed from power for a period of time.

Feel like I am nearly there with this. Would be grateful for any advice/help/suggestions please.
Thanks in advance,
Jim

[DynaxSC]

Re: Faulty ASUS X99-PRO board. Some progress with repair. Need advice\help please.

Hi, when doing the BIOS upgrade with CH341 you probably did not personalize the BIOS. ASUS keeps board no (UUID) and LAN chip MAC addresses inside BIOS, so if doing this with CH341 you should transfer these data from the original BIOS image into the non-personalized image downloaded from ASUS site, this can be done with CoffeeTime software easily. Doing the BIOS update with the BIOS Tool cares about this. Hopefully you did a backup of the original BIOS, otherwise you need a BIOS image from another board or find a way to manually write the missing data from the board stickers into the BIOS image. If that board has a backup BIOS you could try to read out the "personalization" data from it.

Also the other aspect is the ME = Management Engine upgrade (kind of firmware management software for the chipset). During normal BIOS update this will be done by the BIOS Tool software. The ME image is part of the BIOS image, but not all BIOS upgrade images contain the ME (this is updated by Intel from time to time). You should check if you can find the ME version in the BIOS (POST to BIOS), it could happen that it got lost (then you'll find the ME version like 0.0.0.0) or the version inside the chipset is not fully compatible with the BIOS version. Board w/o ME will finally post, but there will be long delays. If you load Windows, you can check if ME is present in Device Manager, under System Devices you must find" "Intel(R) Management Engine Interface #1". If it's not there, then the chipset has no ME. Then you need to degrade the BIOS to the oldest version and reboot (remember to personalize the image), the BIOS should find out that ME is missing, and will program the chipset before POSTing. After this you can normally upgrade again, easiest is to use BIOS tool on the mainboard as ASUS has the internet BIOS upgrade feature which is very nice.

I'm not so sure that this is the reason, most probably not, but it is worth to give it a try, and it's a good practise.

If this will not help, then probably there is a hardware issue, this can have to do with the Super I/O, Chipset and/or a reset logic if present (usually a special chip), all of them are involved in the reset and power on sequence procedure. ASUS usually also uses some custom chips on their boards, so also there can be the issue. Start with the Super I/O as this chip is the most important board control centre and monitors the Power Button, and gives out the activating signals to the chipset and power supply. Find the datasheet for the Super I/O, read it in detail, check ale the basic things like the supply voltages, important signals and their levels (scope), etc., try to find a boardview & schematics for the board and study them, to understand a mainboard architecture, how things are connected and what are the dependencies. Read a lot other cases on this forum. You will need a lot of time and practise to be able to make the repairs easily, but it makes a lot of fun and satisfaction beeing able to repair such things, at least for me.

[DynaxSC]

Re: Faulty ASUS X99-PRO board. Some progress with repair. Need advice\help please.

This might help you, it's a quite similar board.

[jimbodriver]

Re: Faulty ASUS X99-PRO board. Some progress with repair. Need advice\help please.

Thank you for the replies and the information.

Luckily I created a dump file of the BIOS on the chip before I reprogrammed it.

Lots of things for me to try here that look interesting even if they don't end up fixing the power issue.

Once again, thank you for the information. Just what I was looking for.

Cheers,

Jim

[samtec23]

Re: Faulty ASUS X99-PRO board. Some progress with repair. Need advice\help please.

did anyone solve the 00 problems with the Asus x99-pro

[knutruben]

Re: Faulty ASUS X99-PRO board. Some progress with repair. Need advice\help please.

Im looking at a Asus x99-A motherboard with the same exact problem, and have had multiple x99 boards fail in the exact same way.
Both a MSI x99s sli plus, and 2! asus strix x99 gaming with EXACT same fault.
I havent bothered trying to repair any of them until now, but it seems like if i take my heat gun on low, and heat up area around the ram on the left side of the board it will post, and behave normally until shutdown with pwr button. reset works fine.
Im going to look a bit more around the area when i get the time, but Im kind of swamped with other projects at the moment.
The heatgun trick works on all 4 motherboardsi have so it seems this is a common problem so it is kind of strange noone have found a solution to the problem yet. If you search for x99 error 00 boot loop it gives a ton of people with the problem, but very few solutions.
If anyone wanna take a stab at it, try heating the area between the top of the chipset cooler, and the top of the right side of the board.
If anyone figure out anything, please say

[knutruben]

Re: Faulty ASUS X99-PRO board. Some progress with repair. Need advice\help please.

*addition to previous post. I just slowly geat the area while the motherboard is running in the boot loop, and after 20-30 sec on medium heat it just comes alive.

[Juan Fresneda]

Re: Faulty ASUS X99-PRO board. Some progress with repair. Need advice\help please.

Im looking at a Asus x99-A motherboard with the same exact problem, and have had multiple x99 boards fail in the exact same way.
Both a MSI x99s sli plus, and 2! asus strix x99 gaming with EXACT same fault.
I havent bothered trying to repair any of them until now, but it seems like if i take my heat gun on low, and heat up area around the ram on the left side of the board it will post, and behave normally until shutdown with pwr button. reset works fine.
Im going to look a bit more around the area when i get the time, but Im kind of swamped with other projects at the moment.
The heatgun trick works on all 4 motherboardsi have so it seems this is a common problem so it is kind of strange noone have found a solution to the problem yet. If you search for x99 error 00 boot loop it gives a ton of people with the problem, but very few solutions.
If anyone wanna take a stab at it, try heating the area between the top of the chipset cooler, and the top of the right side of the board.
If anyone figure out anything, please say

For all you guys with the same issue, I also had it and was able to repair it.

See my last tread on this (https://www.badcaps.net/forum/troubl...nstead-of-1-05) forum for further diagnostics and some ideas on the issue.

I definitely checked all the forums and available information and was able to reproduce the issue and fix it (although to fix it you will need experience and tools to replace smd IC's) and a multimeter to diagnose it.

Don't hesitate to further ask me questions