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ECS G41T-M7 has broken ACPI, potential southbridge failure?

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First post, by basilizard

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Hi, I recently obtained an ECS G41T-M7 (v1.1) with an E8400 installed. Was planning on using it with either Windows 7 or Vista, depending on how well each ran.

The issue with that is that no OS that requires ACPI is willing to install or run. I did most of this troubleshooting a week or two ago so it's a bit fuzzy, but I remember doing at least this much:

  • Replaced the CR2032 battery and cleared CMOS.
  • Flashed the BIOS to a later version from September 2011
  • Ran the board with no cards installed
  • Burned multiple different ISOs for 7, Vista, and XP

Every time I try to run the Windows 7 Pro 32-bit ISO from the DVD drive, it gets as far into the Windows 7 intro animation as seeing a small red dot appear, and then it immediately locks up and blue screens, saying that the device isn't ACPI compliant. Windows XP produces a similar result.

At some point I looked through the board's manual on theretroweb, and on page 7 it says "Supports ACPI revision 1.0 specification." Now, I'm loosely aware that Windows 7 requires ACPI 2.0 minimum. But this motherboard had a Windows 7 badge on the front of its box, so I'm just completely lost on this one. Surely it has a higher revision than that, right?

The only OS I got to boot on this board was an older Linux ISO that I booted with acpi=off. Even then, I wasn't able to get much info from doing that besides the fact that when ACPI is disabled, the OS runs perfectly fine with no stability issues.

The only thing that I can imagine it being at this point is a damaged southbridge (Intel NH82801GB.) I can't see any signs of physical damage on the board anywhere. There's a single electrolytic cap under the x16 slot that's started bulging, but the rest look alright. Any ideas? Thanks.

Reply 1 of 4, by basilizard

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Figured I'd add a bit more info since I looked into it again last night.

The STOP code for the BSOD on the Windows XP SP3 x86 installer was 0x000000A5 (0x00000011, 0x00000006, 0x00000000, 0x00000000). From what I remember, the AMIBIOS core was something like 080015. The ECS BIOS version date was 09/02/2011, and I found another ROM dump online with the file name 110902s.zip.

The more I look into it, the more it feels like there isn't anything wrong with the southbridge. It just runs way too stable when it's not trying to install an OS with an ACPI check. I've heard it can be due to a corrupted BIOS, but I already flashed it with a CH341A programmer using NeoProgrammer. Bad Winbond chip maybe? It's a socketed DIP-8 chip, so it wouldn't be too hard to replace in theory.

Reply 2 of 4, by zapbuzz

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did you update the bios before or after you ran windows xp and 7?

Reply 3 of 4, by basilizard

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I had the same issue with the original BIOS installing XP and 7, and the newer version didn't result in any substantial change. I think the original BIOS was from 2010, maybe late 2009 at the earliest.

Something that also carried over from the original BIOS into the newer one was that, with every POST, I would get some variation of "Unknown BIOS error. Error code =xxxx".

I tried looking them up, but it looks like AMIBIOS primarily used 2-digit error codes instead of 4-digits, so finding info was pretty difficult. The last two error codes I got were FEEF and FFFF, but I've seen it be a few different codes as well. Resetting CMOS and installing new batteries didn't remove this varying error code, nor did setting the time.

Reply 4 of 4, by Nemo1985

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I wouldn't be surprised if it is an issue of the specific ECS more than the board itself.
I had the very same problem with the ECS P4S5A-DX+ in specific conditions, if I disabled either the com or lpt port windows xp complained about not being fully acpi.

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