home built starts boot up, then dies

[beckster]

Have a new case,power supply,motherboard,cpu, and video card. Using the harddrive, soundcard,memory,cdrom and floppy from old computer.

When I turn on the computer, the light on the motherboard comes on and the cpu fan starts spinning, then just shuts down. Don't even have enough time to get any messages on the monitor. After shutting down, the power light is still lit on the motherboard.

Have an asus jumperless motherboard design, switched off the jumperless setting and manually set the jumpers, still same problem. Have the hard drive hooked up to the ata100/66 primary controller. The cdrom is the master on the secondary ide channel. Had also tried cdrom as the slave on primary channel.

Not sure what to try next. Any help or ideas would be great.

Becky

[Paleo Pete]

First thing to check is a ground problem. make sure nothing on the motherboard is touching the case except the screws that hold the board onto the chassis. If possible try it out of the case, so any possibility of a short is eliminated.

Always put a computer together one item at a time, starting with moptherboard, CPU, memory and video card only. OK, keyboard and monitor might not be a bad idea either. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif Once you have video add other components, starting with the floppy drive, and make sure it boots to a floppy. Then if you have problems later related to a specific hardware component, it's simple to troubleshoot. It's the last component you added.

If this is not a ground problem, the next thing I would suspect is memory. Check to make sure the memory used is compatible with the new board, correctly seated and not plugged in backwards. Check the CPU orientation also.

Could also be a bad power supply, (yes, I know it's new...) or some of the wires plugged in incorrectly. Double check all wiring.

Once you get the machine to boot, try to keep the CD ROM on the secondary IDE channel. If placed on Primary IDE it will slow down the hard drive and therefore the system.

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[beckster]

"...or some of the wires plugged in incorrectly."

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

There was supposed to be a 1 pin gap btwn two of the power wires, I had missed that. Reset the plug to its proper position and, voila! Success.

You're great! Merry Xmas to you.

Many thanks,

Becky

P.S.
Don't put together a new computer while imbibing eggnog and brandy, bad for the health of your puter.

[MartinS]

Originally posted by beckster:
"...
There was supposed to be a 1 pin gap btwn two of the power wires, I had missed that.

.

Becky, which or where is this 1 pin gap???

I have EXACTLY the same problem with my newly built ASUS A7V system, which I guess you have too. I'm pulling my hair out, please enlighten me...:-)

[MartinS]

Its OK I've found it!

But now I have a new problem. I'm using the UDMA 100 IDE master port for my 40GB Fujitsu HD and the bios won't auto detect the drive or even let me manually configure it. The bios doesn't seem to see it. I tried ignoring it, thinking it was something to do with the Promise Controller, partitioned and formatted the drive OK and tried installing Win98. Windows says something at the start of setup about not having a boot device and exits! So I'm a bit foxed. The only other thing I might have done wrong is make the 2nd partition (D) a bootable drive when formatting; I'm not sure if one is supposed to do that...

Any help please???anyone?

[This message has been edited by MartinS (edited 12-26-2000).]

[rkmca]

I'm using Promise ATA100 card also. The way I've done it is as follows,
I've connected the HDD with IDE channel on MOBO and formatted and loaded OS on my system and then everthing else. After making sure everthing is working fine, I've disconnected HDD form MOBO, connected with Promise card, changed the BIOS, load Promise drivers from the supplied diskette and things worked fine. After that downloaded latest drivers from Promise website and updated drivers.

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RM

[MartinS]

Eventually I tried that and eventually I found the option on the bios boot to set to SCSI enable. That did it

Thanks ever so much