Problems with first build

[Kalisperas]

I'm doing my first build, and I'm having more problems. At first my BIOS wouldn't recognize my hard drive, I got that fixed, and upon rebooting the screen just stayed black after posting, and my D-Bracket LED's were stuck in the position that the manual says is "initializing video adapter". I cleared the CMOS, rebooted, and it booted up fine. I let it run overnight, and the next day I played around with it a bit to make sure everything was working, and rebooted. Black screen after posting again. Cleared CMOS, rebooted, booted into Windows just fine. Rebooted again, black screen after posting again. Cleared CMOS again, rebooted...nothing. Tried again...nothing. I've tried different BIOS settings, loading the default BIOS settings, and it refuses to display anything after posting. I've tried booting from the Windows XP CD to the same result. I pulled out the video card, re-seated it, to the same result...twice. Also, I'd assume that at least when booting from my hard drive, I'd hear the startup sound if Windows successfully booted and simply didn't display and video, but I don't hear anything. The HD LED or CD LED (depending on which I'm attempting to boot from) just flashes for awhile as the drive spins as if it were attempting to boot, then it just stops, then the machine just sits there, motionless, silent, with it's eerie blue light from the neon tube, mocking me and all the money I've poured into a big, glowing paperweight.

Any suggestions? This has me really frustrated, and I've got to say that nothing has ever made me appreciate my Mac more than the two days I've had a PC 🙂.

These are my specs:

Mobo: MSI KT3 Ultra2
RAM: 2 x 256 GeIL PC2700
GFX: MSI GeForce4 ti4200 128
CPU: Athlon XP2000
PSU: PowerUp 350W
HD: Western Digital SE 80GB
CDRW: Lite-On 40x12x48
Windows XP Home

Thanks!

 

[Kalisperas]

Correction: I just watched the LED's on my D-bracket for their whole sequence, and it appears that one of them is dead, so I don't know whether this light is supposed to be red or green when is gets stuck. If it's red, it means "initializing video adapter", and if it's green, it means "Booting OS". At this point, the latter seems more likely, as the screen displays the BIOS fine, but if that's the case, why wouldn't it boot from the Windows CD? And why wouldn't it boot off the hard drive when it ran fine overnight, and booted fine twice?

 

[Deskstar]

Before I would jump to the conclusion that one of your new components is bad (eg motherboard), try a few things first; get the setup to its absolutely simplest configuration:

1. drop down to just one memory stick (reason, maybe one of the memory sticks is bad or not seated)
2. remove the hard drive cable (reason, maybe the HDD or the cable is bad)
3. triple check that your heatsink is correctly attached to your chip (I know you checked before, but check again)
and then try to boot from the windows CD only
What happens then?