Slow UEFI boot with I350-T2

[CUllr]

Hello,

I have had an I350-T2 in this PC for several months now without any trouble. Suddenly today, it started acting up. It now takes about 20 seconds longer to boot (before the POST screen even appears), and I have also noticed that the UEFI boot option list keeps growing. If I start with a list that has only the Windows 10 boot manager and the two onboard NICs in it, after the first boot there are two entries for the I350, after the next boot, three, and so on.

My POST code list says that the 20 seconds are spent in "PCI bus initialization"; if I remove the I350, that delay is completely absent.

I have tried to use bootutil to disable the boot ROM on the I350, but it had been disabled already and neither enabling it nor disabling it again had any effect (it keeps adding itself to the UEFI list, see above).

It appears that if I disable the UEFI network support entirely, it works, but I need to boot from the network occasionally.

Any hints, short of a new card?

Thanks,

--

Christian

[idata]

Hi Christian, have you tried installing the I350 on a different slot or you have other adapter for further isolation whether it's PC issue (BIOS) or I350 issue?

thanks,Vince

[CUllr]

Hello Vince,

I have tried as you suggested. What I can say is that neither the same card in a different slot, nor another I350-T2 in whichever slot, work as expected. The behavior is somewhat inconsistent and confusing.

At one point I thought I had found that the long delay and the multiplying UEFI entries only happen when "restart"ing from the OS, booting from full power-off (power supply switch), or entering the UEFI setup, and that neither happens when booting from soft-off, but then I retried and could not reproduce. The difference in behavior was that the time spent in POST code 92 ("PCI bus initialization") was as short as usual, and it spent a few second in 99 ("Super IO initialization") instead. I cycled it five times and ended up with three UEFI entries for the card; five OS "restart"s in a row will result in six such entries. (Sorry for the incoherent info dump, but I don't have a clue what I should be looking for.)

My I350-T2s are both about the same age (manufactured around the middle of 2014). I have another one on order and it should arrive on Tuesday. I will test that one as soon as it gets here.

In case it helps at all, the mainboard is an ASUS Z87-DELUXE, the CPU is an i7-4770K that I wasted a good bit of money on because I'm not overclocking it at all.

Best regards,

Christian

(In my opinion, all hardware should be emulated in software, including the hardware the software runs on, but will anyone listen to me?)

[idata]

Hi Christian, based on the information you've provided. I'd suggest checking with ASUS for possible solution (BIOS-related solutions (update, recovery) since the problem occurs intermittently and in different slots with 2 I350-T2.

regards,Vince

[CUllr]

Vince,

yes, I had reluctantly come to the same conclusion. That other I350-T2 will be here tonight, and if it does not work either, as I expect will happen, I will have to look for new hardware. The BIOS is the latest available, and is from 2014, so it is very likely also the last release.

Thanks anyway for your help.

[idata]

Hi, How's your testing on the new hardware? hope you're able to root cause the issue.

regards,Vince

[CUllr]

Hello Vince,

as expected, the new card (I350T2V2, manufactured March 2016) behaves exactly the same as the other two. I will look into replacing more expensive components now ...

Thank you,

--

Christian

[idata]

Hi Christian,

thank you for providing the update.let us know if you still need additional assistance.Regards,Vince