CDRom causes computer to lock after post?

[beatle]

Excuse me if this is common knowledge among the elite around here, but I'd never seen this happen before. A friend of a friend was having problems with his computer. It had already eaten 2 powersupplies and is now being powered by a 300w Antec. This is an old Athlon 550 on a Gigabyte GA-7IX. My friend had chalked it up to the motherboard finally biting the dust, and I was inclined to agree, as he's capable of fixing most computer problems. The computer would boot, post, and then lock. Bios was inaccessable. He only had a video card in the computer, a 10 gig wd hd, a floppy, and a liteon 48x cdrom. The hd was deemed to be ok, as it could be detected ok in another computer.

As the machine was old, I advised him to pick up a retail XP 1800+, A7N266-VN, 128 meg gf3 ti200, liteon 48x24x48 cdrw, and an internal zip (at his request ) all from newegg. I went about installing all of his parts and fired the new machine up. I went into bios to snoop around and check the temp when the machine hardlocked. I turned it off and checked the hs/fan. Seemed ok. I booted it again and it locked just like the old one did right after posting. Great. I could get this message repeatedly for a while, until I gave up for a while and then went back to it. To my surprise, I got into bios! I looked around for any suspicious settings. When I reached the boot sequence/ide screen it locked again. I power down, pull the hd, boot it up. Lock. HD goes back in, I pull the cdrom. Boot! I can now view the ide listings.

Has anyone seen a similar problem? This is my first experience with a problem like this.

 

[CurtCold]

Yes I had a problem like this yesterday with a 750Duron, A7v133, Maxtor 40GB and 300watt psu. Samsung 44x is bad, and would not boot with the CD drive hooked up.

Would boot with the CD rom hooked up, but not past the bios. Changed CD rom, and it works fine.

First time I've ran into this problem, but I haven't had very many bad CD drives. I think it's a bios detection issue. BIOS would tell me "Primary EIDE device FAIL"

 

[beatle]

Ah, I got no error messages, otherwise I think this would have been a cheaper upgrade/repair.

 

[CurtCold]

Do you have the CD rom as a Secondary master? If the jumper isn't set right on the back, then that could cause the problem. Also if you can get into the bios with the CD rom hooked up, is it detecting it right? I've had that problem before too.

Also if you have another eide cable that came with the mobo, try it, or a different cable.