New machine won't run

[Richard C]

Don't normally frequent this section of the forum but having got some great assistance already from here today, try this one
I Bought an Elite Group Extreme KV2 Lite mobo + 3800 Athlon system upgrade, re-using my existing 8x AGP card, 1m GB DDR RAM, Maxator 120 GB EIDE drive & DVD writer & a new Seagate 320GB SATA, intending to use this as the boot/system drive. Plugged it all in & initially everything looked good; POST displayed the Extreme screen logo, recognised the memory, the SATA drive, the EIDE drive, processor & the DVD so I made some minor changes in the main BIOS & re-booted in order to set up the RAID BIOS but found I could not get into the RAID BIOS utility. Re-booted with Win XP O/S CD & got as far as initiating installation to the point at which you have to install the SATA driver from diskette but the floppy drive wouldn’t work so I switched everything off to investigate.

Now the problems started & it seems to be all over the place; first it wouldn’t POST but then it did so I went back into BIOS & loaded the default settings but this didn’t make any difference. I then cleared the CMOS & managed to get back as far as BIOS utility but as soon as I re-booted it wouldn’t POST again. I’ve spent half 1 ½ days trying different things; dismantling & rebuilding everything, different combinations – i.e. just the SATA drive, just the EIDE drive, no drive at all & just a boot disk, all without luck! There doesn’t seem to be any pattern, very occasionally I get a flash of the Extreme logo & am then able to get in to BIOS but as soon as I try to re-boot it goes awol again.

I’ve successfully built several systems before but this has got me stuffed; am I missing something? Doing something stupid? Or is the mobo faulty & its time to log on to the supplier & get an RMA? Any help would be appreciated.

 

[JohnD]

it usually simplifies things if you unplug everything you possibly can - drives, sound cards, graphics card if you have on-board graphics.

If you set BIOS to default it should at least boot to POST and start looking for a Floppy if you do that.

If it won't even do that, the fault must surely be in m/b; mem, or processor.

If you have a start-up disk frrom your windows version it should read that and ask you what to do next, and you could give it a CD drive to read the Windows disk from, and boot from CD.

On my syst, DVD drives need drivers from the Windows disk, so not much good for initial system load (maybe newer m/bs can do it.)

p.s. It sounds like you have probably tried all this, so I'd give up now I buy my barebones or m/b packs as a set, so would get on to my supplier at this point.

 

[Spark123]

I don't follow what you are trying to do with RAID? RAID is aimed more or less at having two identical hard drives (don't know if it will work with one SATA and one IDE - never tried it but it doesn't sound right!!).
RAID normally come in two flavours, Mirror and Stripe.
Mirror was basically for reliability i.e. whatever was written to one hard disk was written to the other, if one should fail the other disk could take charge.
Stripe was basically for speed, this wrote to the disks alternatively hence increasing the read/write speeds, although with stripe the reliability is halved i.e. if one disk failed the other one only has half the data hence the lot is lost.
There are more types of RAID available which are a bit more advanced.

Have you tried resetting the BIOS using the jumper/button?

 

[Richard C]

Thanks for the response folks, it's appreciated.
John.
Just tried installing the other 512 mb memory stick I was still running my old machine with & it successfully booted; I switched off again & boot failed so I swapped the memory sticks over again & it’s now booted on the first one. It seems that it may not like the memory I’m using (I thought those days were long gone!) but it originally booted OK & showed the full1024 mb. It’s Crucial DDR which has run my old machine fine for nearly 4 years so I don’t really understand why it’s playing up with the new mobo. Looks like some new memory is required, let’s hope I can keep the thing running long enough to install the O/S.

My problem now is Windows set up won’t see the full 320Gb of the new SATA disc; it’s a while since I last did an install on a large SATA drive, I thought the capacity problem had also long been overcome?

Spark; I do understand RAID configurations & the fact you need 2 identical SATA drives; the mobo documentation also lists a something called JBOD (just a bunch of drives) which I assumed you have to set to allow a mixed configuration of SATA/EIDE drives so that’s why I was trying to have a look but perhaps I’ve misunderstood & the raid utility is only available when the BIOS detects 2x SATA drives.

 

[JohnD]

My RAID only works with 2 SATAs.

p.s. Is the CMOS battery OK?

 

[Richard C]

My RAID only works with 2 SATAs.

p.s. Is the CMOS battery OK?

Yes & I know that's correct; not really interested in RAID at the mo, I have legacy 4 x 120MB EIDE drives I want to use for capacity so am primarily interested in retaining that capacity with the extra bite I know SATA will give me on the OS.

Re PS; It's a new mobo so CMOS bat ought to be OK; I've also checked that BIOS maintains on power down so, yes, I think it's OK. New machine is now booting OK every time so it may just have been down to dirty contacts on my old memory sticks (don't know!). still trying to get XP to recognisee the full capacity of the SATA drive so I can install & am just about to try a 3rd party format programme to get a useable partition I can actually load to, I should then be able to format the rest of the drive.
Again, thanks for the input keep it coming if you have anything else.

 

[Softus]

My problem now is Windows set up won’t see the full 320Gb of the new SATA disc; it’s a while since I last did an install on a large SATA drive, I thought the capacity problem had also long been overcome?

It had, but are you installing from a CD image that includes SP2?

See this: http://forums.microsoft.com/genuine/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=404067&SiteID=25

 

[Richard C]

Keep forgetting little wrinkles like that, one of the problems when you leave it too long between OS instalations; thanks softus.