Dear EVGA support team,
My name is Georgi Valkov,
I am writing regarding an issue with the RMA mainboard that I have received on May the 14 2015.
I wish to get the attention of the developers team to investigate and resolve it!
Here is a copy of my original letter sent to on 19.05.2015 16:12 GMT+3:
I have discovered an issue with the RMA board that also existed on the defective one.
To summarise: It might be possible to damage EVGA x58 FTW3 by attempting to boot OpenBSD from a USB thumb drive. The USB stick I used has a fresh installation of OpenBSD 5.7 and boots correctly on my HP laptop /edit: and also on an Asus computer/. I have provided more details and download link below.
Symptoms and steps to reproduce:
1. Connect the USB stick with OpenBSD to the EVGA board, and power-on the computer.
2. It will freeze at the POST screen that shows "CPU, RAM, Press DEL to enter setutp, ESC for boot device", etc...
3. Wait 5-6 seconds, the computer is still not responding to keyboard.
4. If I reset/power off the computer now and disconnect the USB stick it will start the OS from HDD, where I can reconnect and use the USB stick without issues (I tried both Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux).
5. If I skip step 4 and wait longer: maybe 30 seconds or a minute (this is what happened to the old board and I'm afraid to try it on the replacement), the computer powered off and never came back to live. I tried the clear CMOS button, removed the battery, switched the jumper to second BIOS, nothing helped. I can see that the mainboard is sending power-on signal to the PSU, but my best guess is that the overload protection shuts down the PSU.
6. Now that I received the replacement board I see that the rest of my hardware works properly. PSU voltages are within valid range and ripple is < 10 mv p-p. The computer still freezes on step 3, but I never went to step 5, as I'm afraid it may damage the new board.
Other symptoms:
If I power on the computer and connect the USB stick with OpenBSD before starting an OS, for example: on any of the POST screens, the CMOS Setup or the Boot device selection menu, then the computer stops responding. For comparison, if I format the same USB stick with NTFS and do the same, it only freezes for 1 second and then continues responding to keyboard.
Notes:
The defective board was running firmware version 82, and on the replacement I have updated to the latest 83.
My computer is configured to boot from HDD as first boot device, 2nd, 3rd and boot other device are disabled. I need to press ESC and use the Boot menu if I want to boot from second HDD, CD or USB. At any rate it should not attempt to boot from USB on its own, yet it freezes at start-up if the USB stick is connected. I also tried to format the USB stick with NTFS and put the Windows 7 boot files on it. In this case, the computer no longer freezes, I can Boot from it, and it shows me the Windows boot menu.
Support request:
My best guess is that some firmware routines on the EVGA board might be recognising the OpenBSD media as commands to update firmware or replace configuration. This can easily lead to corrupting the firmware, if a payload is used without verifying signature or checksum. Please investigate the image I have provided (download link is below) and keep me informed on the case if possible! I hope EVGA can resolve this and provide a working firmware. I am willing to assist on resolving this to the best way I can. BTW I need to run OpenBSD on this machine, so I can port my web server project httpstorm to work on it.
OpenBSD 5.7 disk image:
Here is a download link to the disk image and instructions how to write it to a USB stick.
1. Download this file: OpenBSD-USB.img.7z
2. Use the 7-zip archiver to extract it:
3. There are 3 files inside:
- OpenBSD.img is the actual disk image that should be written to a USB stick. Use any stick with 4 GB or more.
- gfc.exe - command line tool that can write the image to USB stick. Requires a 64 bit version of Windows and Administrative privileges. Run without parameters for help.
- write-disk2.cmd - script that automates the process. Please edit in Notepad to specify the correct disk number, before running as Administrator. Actual disk number can be viewed in Disk Management: Right click My Computer, click Manage, and navigate to Storage, Disk Management. Example: for Disk 3 use the following command:
gfc OpenBSD.img \\.\PhysicalDrive3 -Write -v -O
4. Once the image is written to a USB stick, try to boot it.
5. Please be careful not to destroy many boards!
6. Also try to boot some none EVGA computer - my laptop starts OpenBSD from this stick without any issues.
Additional details - Steps I used to prepare the OpenBSD image:
I have used VMWare to install OpenBSD and obtain a disk image that can easily be transferred to USB:
1. Download this file: OpenBSD-vmware.7z
2. Copy OpenBSD.img inside the extracted folder and rename it to OpenBSD-flat.vmdk.
3. The virtual machine is ready to run in VMWare.
There is nothing special in the way I installed OpenBSD:
A copy of the install media is here:
1. Use cd57.iso to boot.
2. Install from network, all packages.
3. Create a Custom boot label: only one partition for the entire system, no swap.
Thank you very much for any help! I hope you can provide a new firmware that resolves the issue. Let me know if I can help!
Best regards,
eng. Georgi Valkov,
PhD Student (electronics) at the Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria
RMAID: 400314
Customer ID: 1092631
/[style="line-height: 1.8;"]end of original e-mail/
Unfortunately after my e-mail and over 50 minutes in 4 international phone calls, I am being completely ignored by the EU technical service manager Dominik Ungermann, so I have decided to make this article available to public.