Help!

[iseeoldpeople]

Before I spend any more money replacing parts, I will see if anyone can help me here. I have a computer that is about 18 months old that I built myself. I never had problems with it until I installed a second hard drive. After about a month with a second hard drive, the computer would not boot with the second hard drive attached. Then, a few weeks later, it would not boot with the first hard drive attached. It WILL boot if only the dvd or cd rom drives are attached. (it doesn't matter if they are in the primary or secondary IDE slots) I purchased a new hard drive, installed it yesterday, and same thing. When I turn on the computer, all of the fans run and the MOBO LED lights come on. I have tried clearing the CMOS (with the jumper), replacing the battery, using the hard drive as a slave. It have an NFS7 MOBO with an Athlonxp 2600 processor. I have 1gig of ram (which shows up when the computer boots) I can only get into my bios with the hard drive not attached. ANY suggestions? I have a 450 watt power supply. It does not make any beeps with the hard drive attached. It just start up and then after 2-3 seconds, it quits. The lights on the motherboard stay lit, but nothing else happens. Does it sound like a motherboard problem? processor? power supply?? HELP! I have seven kids and only want to replace what I need replaced. Thank you so much for your help.

 

[Harvey]

Some motherboards do not deal with the "Cable Select" setting very well. Try manually setting the jumpers on all of your drives as Master or Slave, including your optical drives.

If it starts to boot, you can check the results of your settings by looking in the CMOS.

Good luck.

 

[iseeoldpeople]

Hi,
Thank you for your answer, but I have already tried this. It is the most bizarre thing I have ever seen. I am starting to think that after the holidays, I am going to buy a barebones kit and just rebuild it. :-(

 

[btcomm1]

Well to be it sounds like your BIOS is corrupted. Someone might have more knowlege then me but if you have tried the same IDE cables and same IDE ports on your motherboard that work with CD drives but you can't even get a bios screen or enter bios setup while any HD is connected to the same working ports and cables then it sounds like your bios is locking up because it doesn't know how to handle HD's anymore. If there is a way you could flash your bios from a bootable cd then I would recomend you try that and if that doesn't work it sounds like your motherboard needs replacing.