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Booting problems for a first time computer builder...

L

leapingfrog

Junior Member
Yesterday I recieved almost all of my computer parts (except my video card) and started to build my computer. I mounted the mobo, put in RAM, plopped in my CPU, applied thermal grease to it, put the heatsink on it, put in hard drive, CDRW, and floppy drive (all except the floppy are configured to master, because the floppy drive is jumperless) gave power to the mobo, hard drives, fans, etc., and then put the video card (PCI) from this computer into my PCI expansion slot and I was ready to turn it on...

First time it the computer goes on and dies. Why? Because I didn't have my power supply turned up to full power. I changed it and tried again, the all my fans spin (heatsink, case fans, etc.) but I hear no hard disk spinning, CDRW light just stays lit, no beep codes. So, I turn it off by pulling out the cord from the back of the case since pushing the button on the case chassis again wouldn't turn it off. I make sure all the drives are properly configured, and it appears as they are. Hard drive is on its own channel, CDRW on its own channel, and floppy is jumperless, but still on its own cable. Boot up again, still the same thing. So, I unplug the IDE cables out of the mobo and boot up. Hard disk spins, CDRW light turns off, and everything seems just fine.

Here is my setup:
-300 watt power supply
-Antec Mid-tower Case
-Abit KT7A mobo
-Crucial SDRAM PC133 512MB
-Western Digital 60GB HD
-Teac Floppy Drive
-Plextor CDRW
-AMD Athlon 1.2Ghz 266Mhz FSB
-Thermaltake Heatsink (AMD Approved)
-Arctic Silver Compound

Could anyone please help me? I'm very unsure of what is wrong and have a feeling I might have just costed myself a lot of money. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 


<< First time it the computer goes on and dies. Why? Because I didn't have my power supply turned up to full power. I changed it and tried again, the all my fans spin (heatsink, case fans, etc.) but I hear no hard disk spinning, CDRW light just stays lit, no beep codes. >>


Power supply up to full power? Are there settings on your power supply? You do have your monitor plugged into your video card and you know the video card and monitor both work right? Since the case switch isn't working, did you make sure you have it plugged on to the mobo in the right place and with the right orientation?
 

I think the power switch is set so you need to hold it down 4 seconds before it will turn off. I've never heard of a power supply with power settings on it. Perhaps the setting was at 220V instead of 110V and he switched it to 110V?

So, I unplug the IDE cables out of the mobo and boot up. Hard disk spins, CDRW light turns off, and everything seems just fine.

So you booted up w/o the CDRW and HDD attached via IDE cable, but with the molex power conenctors plugged in? So is your question &quot;did I have the cables plugged in incorrectly?&quot; The 80-pin IDE cables should all be color-coded. You plug in the blue connector to the motherboard. You plug in the black connector to the master device. The gray connector is for the slave device.
 
You do have your monitor plugged into your video card and you know the video card and monitor both work right?

Yeah, my monitor and video card works. My video card was taken from this computer.

Since the case switch isn't working, did you make sure you have it plugged on to the mobo in the right place and with the right orientation?

Well, the case switch does work, but only for turning it on, and I'm fairly sure all my connections are right. I've checked the manual several times. I can't press it again to turn the computer back off.

I think the power switch is set so you need to hold it down 4 seconds before it will turn off. I've never heard of a power supply with power settings on it. Perhaps the setting was at 220V instead of 110V and he switched it to 110V?

It was at 110V when I first booted up, but it died right away so I moved it up to 230V and it runs fine without dying on me.


So you booted up w/o the CDRW and HDD attached via IDE cable, but with the molex power conenctors plugged in? So is your question &quot;did I have the cables plugged in incorrectly?&quot; The 80-pin IDE cables should all be color-coded. You plug in the blue connector to the motherboard. You plug in the black connector to the master device. The gray connector is for the slave device.

Yeah, that is how I booted up and all the CDRW and HDD run just fine. When the IDE cables are attached to the mobo, they don't.

According to what you just said, I think I have everything correctly plugged in.
 
Check your manual and make sure that your CPU fan is plugged into the right header. This is an issue with KY7's I'm not sure about the KT7A. BIOS needs to get signal from the fan, or it goes nowhere. Make sure you have default setup BIOS enabled till you get it right.
 
Thanks for all your help guys, but I got it now 🙂 I had forgotten to reset the CMOS settings.

BUT I am having a few problems I'm afraid :| Windows installed just fine now and everything, but once and awhile I'll be installing a game (eg. Halflife) and all the sudden I'll get a BSOD saying I can't write to drive c: and that data or files may be lost. Something to that effect. So, I end up rebooting. A few times the computer will freeze up all the sudden, and other times my computer will just restart in the middle of something (most often when installing something).

It sounds heat related to me. My CPU temp. when the computer is idle for a few min is about 81 degrees and is around 111-144/116 when playing Unreal/Halflife. My case temp is around 74-77/78. Too hot? Too cold? Just right?

I also think the problem MIGHT be with me enabling DMA support (not sure exactly what it is) with a mobo driver because most things were running fine before then.
 
That doesn't sound heat related to me if those are your system temps. There could be a couple of things that are going wrong.

It could be a problem with the hdd. My IBM 75GXP recently caused me all sorts of problems with BSODs and I/O lockups (you can tell these by looking at the hdd light when nothing seems to respond, if its on, its in I/O lockup). The lock-ups occured whenever there was high disk activity, ie anti-virus scan. The BSOD's I could really figure out what it was, but from the error message it looked I/O related. I ran the IBM diagnostic utility and it detected some surface errors (bad sectors and whatnot). I talked to the company I bought it from and they suggested either running a low-level format or returning. As I didn't want to be without a computer for 2 weeks, I tried the low-level format and the error went away. That was in November and I've never had it happen again. So you could try doing a low-level format on the drive and reinstalling everything again. Note: my drive was practically brand new when this happened so age is not a factor.

Also, my roommate has the Abit KT7A mobo with RAID and it used to lockup on him a lot. I think it had something to do with using a 266FSB chip but we never could figure out what it was. I think it was more likely the SB Live! 5.1 he had in there causing conflicts the VIA southbridge.

Concerning the DMA issue. You can go into the BIOS and make sure that the hdd is set to auto-detect. That way it will find what level of DMA it can run at (my guess is U-DMA 5 which is ATA-100). In the OS, you will need to turn on DMA support. I only have Win2k to go by (gave up on the Win9x line long ago) so I can only give you help on that. Go to the device manager, select IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, and double click on Primary IDE Channel. Under the Advance Settings tab, set the device type to &quot;Auto Detection&quot; and the transfer mode to &quot;DMA if available&quot;. This will enable the computer to really use DMA, which is a good thing. Note: if you have VIA's 4in1 drivers installed, there will be a Bus Master instead of the channels (least there used to be) so that setup will be a bit different. I used to use the bus mastering drivers until it caused all sorts of problems with my CDRW and DVD drives.

Hope that helps, any questions just ask.
 
Ahh.. I wish I had a printer to print out what you just said! 🙂

Anyway... I think I'm going to format, but how do I do a low level format? If that fixed your prob it might fix mine. I have a KT7A mobo, SBLive X-Gamer 5.1, so this isn't looking so promising.

I *really* hope I can get it up and running nice and stable.
 
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