Symptoms:
When you reboot your computer which has an ASUS X99 Deluxe-II motherboard, it goes through the POST fine, but when it hands over to the OS, you get a black screen with a flashing text cursor in the top left corner. Examining the Q-code display on the motherboard shows error “AE”.
Reasons:
It’s not clear why this happens. From various searches on the web, it would seem that this could be due to a badly behaved USB device. It’s certainly not Operating System specific as it happens even when trying to boot from CD/DVD.
It also seems to be independent of BIOS version, as I have seen it happen with the factory-shipped BIOS, and also 1601 and 1701.
Solution:
Check all USB devices, connecting each one in turn until you find the culprit. In my case it was a Sony PS2 controller to USB adaptor I was using.
Workarounds:
If the above solution doesn’t solve it, the following workarounds may help you:
Power down the computer completely including switching off the power supply (it helps if your PSU has a power switch), wait 10-15 seconds until all lights on the motherboard have extinguished, and then power back on again.
A full CMOS reset with the small reset button on the motherboard often fixes it, but this is very inconvenient as you then need to setup your BIOS again.
