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Working with an Asus A53E laptop. Enabled UEFI boot mode in the UEFI program and installed Windows 8.1 x64 successfully last night.

Now, today, when I start up the machine from cold boot, I can clearly hear the hard drive spin up and then immediately spin back down. This process repeats again, and finally on the third time, the drive stays spinning and the firmware logo appears and the system boots normally. During these "reboots", the LCD never powers on - it finally does upon the third reboot before the OS loads.

Clearly it's related to the UEFI mode. I could disable UEFI and go through reinstalling Windows, but was curious as to why this would happen in the first place, and if it really is a problem with UEFI. I would feel like this behavior shouldn't be caused directly by simply having UEFI turned on?

For a spinning drive, these reboots are obviously not the best thing in the world for it. And if nothing else, it adds considerable time to the power-on POST. Through these three cycles I measured about 20 seconds before the LCD even comes on.

Tl;dr - Why would enabling UEFI Boot mode on an Asus A53E laptop cause it to cycle through three POSTs before finally powering on and beginning to load the OS?

Hennes
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fdmillion
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  • I updated the BIOS to the latest revision for this machine (221) and also did a BIOS settings reset (which temporarily placed the boot mode back to legacy BIOS) - and the POST loop still occurs. I also tried swapping the RAM modules, removing the HDD, and even removing the optical drive - nothing, the system still POSTs 3 times before booting. Only other thing I could think of is checking the CMOS battery, but the videos on Youtube make taking apart this laptop look like a chore... And in any case the clock is not losing time, so not sure that's even it... – fdmillion Jan 15 '15 at 05:00
  • This laptop is apparently not new, probably 3 years old, no longer under warranty. It's entirely possible that some contact is flaky and malfunctions when the laptop is stone-cold. UEFI does the boot differently than BIOS, so might encounter this problem. Two ideas: (1) Reboot immediately after boot to see if the problem disappears in order to check my above theory, (2) If the problem disappears then some cleaning and contacts-improving is in order. – harrymc Jan 15 '15 at 14:03
  • It doesn't appear temperature related or anything like that. It *always* does the three reboots now, even after fully resetting the BIOS back to factory defaults. It also does it with different known-good RAM. However, it passes a burn-in test without any issues - I ran it for 2 hours at full CPU load, the system obviously got quite warm, but nothing bad happened and CPU temp didn't go above about 80C. After this, reboot still behaved exactly the same. Let the laptop cool off overnight, booted again, same. It's more annoying than a problem since after the POST finally passes, it's all good... – fdmillion Jan 17 '15 at 08:02
  • It definitely looks like a hardware problem. You're saying that after the BIOS update it doesn't matter whether you choose UEFI or Legacy mode, the system still POSTs 3 times? And this happens even after removing the HDD and say booting off of USB or a Live CD? – Vinayak Jan 17 '15 at 09:15
  • You mentioned that you've tried booting with different RAM sticks installed and the problem still recurs. Did you by any chance try booting with a *single* known-good memory module installed? Maybe also try alternating between all the memory slots on your motherboard? – Vinayak Jan 17 '15 at 09:21
  • @Vinayak: I don't believe this can be RAM, as the laptop works flawlessly after the POST succeeds, even for burn-in test. – harrymc Jan 17 '15 at 09:40
  • @harrymc I see. Well, if we've ruled out RAM and HDD, I suppose the problem lies with some component on the motherboard. – Vinayak Jan 17 '15 at 12:49

2 Answers2

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I did a Google search and found a few similar problems mentioned here and here, the latter being the most similar to the issue faced by the OP.

One solution proposed on Tom's Hardware by Luke Cool is to perform a minimum systems check by disconnecting everything (including RAM and HDD) other than the bare essentials needed to boot the computer to see if the problem recurs (i.e. check whether power cycling still occurs).

If it doesn't, one of the disconnected components must be faulty. To determine which that might be, you could connect one component at a time until the you face the power cycling problem again and then you'd know what's causing the problem.

However, if the problem persists during the minimum systems check, Luke advises checking to see if the CPU is properly seated in its socket on the motherboard (which seems irrelevant in this case since the computer does boot after 3 tries)

The answer presented here suggests that the BIOS information might be changing with the first power cycle (first two power cycles in your case) and by the third power cycle, the information is updated in the BIOS and the computer is ready to boot. This reminds me of the old Verifying DMI Pool Data... messages that I used to see on my old computer after a hardware change, which generally took two power cycles before the computer was ready to boot again.

SuperUser member @ralford suggests using a POST card to obtain the error code generated during POST and then find out the meaning associated with the hexadecimal error code by looking it up on BIOS Central.

Community
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Vinayak
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I have run into similar situations when changing the UEFI setting with a already installed operating system, sometimes to the point that the drive becomes unbootable unless the UEFI setting is restored to it's original setting. I'm assuming that the installation process writes the UEFI settings into the boot partition, once this setting is changed in the bios the boot file does not get changed, or just becomes confused, hence your repeated attempts to boot, perhaps your bios is cycling through the UEFI boot options until it finds the one that works. If you want to keep your current UEFI boot option, try installing a raw drive, and possibly doing a clean Windows install on it, to see if the problem continues with the clean install.

Michael
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