Can't boot

[Aprime]

Hey, I've just got all the parts from Newegg to finally assemble my new rig... Which I did, it took me two hours (I'm slow).

Now, if I attempt to boot it up all the LEDs in the case, including the PSU's, the fans, etc... Basically everything, what will boot up, but will automatically shut down less than a second after I gave the rig juice.

I've never came along an issue like this in the past, I have no idea why it's doing this, I don't know if the PSU can't keep up with the rig or whatever, but the 500w I got sounded and based on the rigs that were built using seems to be proper, I could be wrong but unplugging the video card from it's two auxiliary power inputs didn't seem to help either.

So... Any ideas? Could it be that I messed something up when I connected the cables? Could it be some sort of protection on the motherboard's side or is it just that I don't have enough juice to power the thing? All the parts seem to be fine at first glance, so I'm guessing it's either one of those.

NZXT Hush
Rosewill 500W power supply
Gigabyte EP45-UD3P
Intel Quad Core 9300
Nvidia 260GTX MSI ver.
8GB of RAM
Audigy 4 PCI sound card
Seagate 500GB 32MB Cache SATA
Western Digital 500GB 16MB Cache SATA
Maxtor 250GB 8MB Cache IDE
USB-powered memory card reader
1 DVD Writer

 

[Denithor]

First thing to try is strip away everything not required to boot. Basically just leave CPU on motherboard, 1 stick of RAM, video card. With these all plugged in properly (PSU plugged into both spots on motherboard and into video card) try to boot.

If the same thing happens, time for a little more drastic step: pull these components out of the case, set up on the motherboard box as before and try to boot. Here you're testing to make sure you didn't get an unintentional ground or something when installing into the case.

Report back with what it does (if it boots in the first case, obviously no need to yank everything out).

 

[Aprime]

It's not my cabling.

My stock heatsink broke while I tried removing it (plastic 'hinges' ftl), so I can't do any testing right now, pisses me off.

I've got enough juice, according to plenty of people.

So it's likely a grounding issue, if the mobo was fried it wouldn't be booting like that and if it was anything else I think it'd boot and but I'd get an error message, of course I'm saying this based on my experience so I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

 

[TheKub]

Another easy thing to check is make sure your CPU HSF is plugged into the correct header for it. If it happens to be plugged into a different one the motherboard may be powering down becasue the CPU fan speed is 0 even though its running fine on another header.

I've never had one do that but in the past I've seen them have a audible alarm telling you the fan is not spinning so its not a stretch thinking they could auto power off in that situation.

 

[Aprime]

Just a quickie, on the tray, how am I suppose to make it boot up by itself (without the case, I mean)? -_-

 

[TheKub]

Plug in everything normally then use a screwdriver (other metal object) to short the 2 pins that connect to the power switch on the front panel connectors.

 

[Aprime]

Hey guys, turns out the PSU's DOA.

Thanks for the help!

 

[Aprime]

...
Okay, what the hell.

It's a juice issue, I can't believe it.

The moment I try to power on the graphics card it just does the same thing the other one did.

 

[Aprime]

I got all that solved, it boots but now I have drive recognition issues. My first experience with SATA, so maybe I could use some clarifications. Do I need to put the drives in the proposed order or does that not matter? Note, at the time I wrote this I finished fiddling around with the BIOS so that may or may not have something to do with it.

 

[krnmastersgt]

A quality 500w would be enough to power your set-up, but you have Rosewill, which is the opposite of quality. There's a proposed order? If you're talking about the numbered slots, aka SATA1 or whatever on the board/bios, all it's there for is to tell you which thing is connected to which port, not an order that they should be in. I'm more interested in why your system is suddenly booting correctly, from the description it was either a crappy psu or a ground, but you said it was the PSU, if you still had the underpowering issue when you got a new PSU how is it working now?

 

[Aprime]

I got a 750W Thermaltake to replace it.

I had no wiring or grounding issues whatsoever - I got a 500W Thermaltake after I couldn't figure out why the Rosewill wouldn't work anymore and promptly found out the video card was responsible for sucking the amps (and that the other 500W wasn't keeping up, either, but at least it allowed me to figure out what was truly wrong). The rails died on the Rosewill while trying to power the damn thing up a couple of times, simply put.

I also found out one of my RAM sticks was DOA, and that Vista's installation software would f' up if you have a USB stick connected to the computer that's about to receive Windows.

Now I'd love to figure out why my Maxtor HD is being recognized but I can't format it or anything. I didn't have Linux on the damn thing so that's one possibility out of the window.

I'm also glad to report that while trying to figure out what was wrong I broke the stock heatsink, resulting in the purchase of a Zalman. CPU temperature? A mere 26°C with a 500MHz overclock.

 

[Aprime]

Ah, I'm trying to figure, could the memory not be faulty and all of this be cause by a BIOS issue?

To sum it up, that stick causes my computer to blue screen on boot.

 

[Aprime]

To my surprise, I did have Linux installed on the Maxtor. An old Ubuntu Distro, I totally forgot that my primary hard drive on my old 2004 tower was a Western Digital 120GB'er that my step-father's presently using in is 'outdoors' PC.

I'm thinking the RAM might be good but the Voltage might not be set properly. The memory was designed to run at 2.0, the rest seems to be doing fine at 1.8v but this particular stick might not.

I'm trying to find some sort of way out of this because I can't return individual RAM sticks, I have to return the entire set and Newegg's out of stock on that type.