building new system, random freezing, hints?

[rei]

please move if this is inappropriate and should be in general hardware. here are the parts:

new asus a7n-266-c, antec sx1000 tower, athlonxp1900+, arkua 6129 fan, liteon 16x10x40 burner, pioneer 16x dvd, 3com etherlink xl pci nic, visontek gf3ti200, asus nforce 5.1 audio riser card, 2 sticks 256mb of micron cas 2.5 ddr2100 ram, 80gig 7200rpm maxtor, ms natural pro keyboard in usb+ps2, ms intellimouse explorer 3.0 in ps2, enermax 451w fan-adjustable psu, 2nd usb header and daughterboard, dell 21" 1626HT trinitron monitor, floppy drive

here's what happens, i throw the mobo into the case, throw bare minimum of gf3 in agp slot, 2 slots down i put the nic, 4 slots down i put the riser (last slot) primary ide master is the maxtor hd, secondary ide master is liteon cdrw, slave is dvdrom. tried disabling/enabling floppy, no effect. cables all tight, and fitted.

my problem is that, it refuses to reboot when after booting from windows xp cd in either of my optical drives: it will refuse to reboot after finishing the blue-screen text part and after the textual red bar fills, other times it will reboot that time, and fail to reboot after graphical sometime) sometimes it finishes graphical setup, and will randomly not shutdown or turn off (cursor freezes at last shutting down phase) (brand new hd, doing a full ntfs capacity quick format) after i have managed to claw my way through a finished windows xp setup and it's running for the 1st time.

tried it with just dvdrom as slave, (unplugged cdrw) boots to xp install, loads storage adapter drivers, freezes at 'starting windows' 4 out of 4 times. pulled out nic, no difference. take off usb header, no change.

tried alternating the ram sticks, no difference in results. i'm thinking it's not nforce drivers or anything because this is very low-level stuff, booting and rebooting, CMOS/BIOS settings are all default or safe...anything in there that could affect this? this is driving me insane...any hints, folks? before i disassemble the whole damn thing to see if it's something stupid as a metal contact...? (but the whole predictability of -where- it hangs peeves me)

what causes a system not to be able to shutdown/reboot? do led connectors affect this? what could be damaged/wrong? aaagh.

tried to put as much detail in there. sorry for the length.

 

[rei]

uh, here's strange behaviour. when i disable fast POST/startup, ramcount just keeps cycling (i have 512mb so it takes a long time) indefinitely (i let it sit 5-6 times). doesn't this usually check -twice-?

 

[MrDudeMan]

you probably are having some kind of IRQ conflict, make sure everything is seated right, set the bios to default everything, and try again

 

[MisterDuck]

Oy. I hate problems like this, because they're a complete and total pain to trouble shoot since it seems like you're getting really erratic results...

personally, I had problems like this one time with an EPOX motherboard, and it was the motherboard...after I got a new one, everything worked just dandy.

If I were you, I'd try flashing the BIOS on the MB with the latest version, and also setting everything in the bios to default. One stick of ram. No Network card. No Audio riser. If you have an alternate video card, try using it instead of the GF3. If you have an alternate power supply, you might consider trying that too - I know certain MB's don't like Enermax PS's for some reason or another.
Another thing you can do is run the entire system outside of the box to see if you're grounding out somewhere, although I sort of doubt that's the problem.

If that doesn't help, then I'd reccomend returning/RMA'ing the motherboard, since it's usually just a hardware problem. I know that when I got a new MB (and I was having very, very similar errors as you were) everything just worked perfectly.

 

[rei]

That was the stupidest of things. "Legacy USB Keyboard" had to be enabled. Grr. That has never been a problem with my PS/2 (granted USB was plugged in as well, it's a USB hub-type MS Natural Pro keyboard) port connection. This setting has been 'disabled' in the last 3 of my mobos without complaint.