[edit]FIRST THING. Ground yourself!! This is done by touching the metalic part of your case. Do this often as you work in your case. Secondly, I'm using my MSI K7T MB as frame of reference, so some things I say may be different from your Motherboard's manual, BIOS menus, etc., but you should be able to figure things out by looking for what seems closest to what I'm talking about. But I've heard that your MB and mine are very similar when it comes to BIOS, menus, etc. Thirdly, please excuse me if my instructions seem simplistic as I don't know how technically inclined you are. I've tried to make everything easy to understand, so don't feel offended if you already know most of this stuff.[/edit]
Okay, this is what I'd do. Since you haven't installed much of anything yet, start from the beginning. Make sure your Mother Board is mounted properly on the case. If not, it could be causing a periodic short to the system if it moves around and touches anything it's not supposed to.
Look in your MB manual to see how to clear the CMOS. This is usually done by changing a jumper on the board itself for a couple of seconds (called shorting, I believe), then replacing it where it was before. Don't try to boot with the jumper in the new position. Most likely it won't even turn on, and you'll think that you're really screwed when that's not the case.
Take a close look at your manual. Make sure you have set everything set up properly - all the jumpers, switches, etc. Are the case connectors connected properly - power switch, reset switch, power LED, speaker, HDD LED, etc. These are all in your manual.
Are all the cables plugged in correctly (red stripe of IDE cable goes to J1 on your drives and MB connector). Take all your cards out except video and RAM. Make sure RAM is in bank 1 (see manual, obviously). You can install the other cards later. Oh yeah, make sure the video card and RAM are firmly in place. Make sure all exterior cables are firmly in place - monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer cables and so on. Make sure the jumpers on the drives themselves are set up correctly - Master for master, slave for slave.
I see you have a CDRW. Disconnect that for now. Can install it later. As a matter of fact, just start with a bare system - floppy, CD-Rom, HDD. Nothing fancy. Let's get the system up and running first. If your MB comes with built-in Audio, modem, LAN, etc., disable these in BIOS for now. You can install them later on - one-by-one. Windows is very picky about new hardware sometimes. It's best to just do one at a time.
Now, boot up, go into BIOS, select "Use Optimized Defaults" or there should be something comparable to that. Go to "Standard CMOS Setup" to set the time and date. This will have been wiped since we cleared the CMOS. Everything else in that menu should be fine.
Go to "Advanced BIOS Features". Disable anti-virus protection if it is not already. Then set your First Boot Device to floppy, second to CDROM, third to HDD-0(zero). If these are not available in your BIOS, don't worry. I'm sure you'll be able to figure things out from the manual. "OS Selection for DRAM >64" should be set to Non-OS2 since you're using Windows. Everything else in this menu should be fine.
Go to "Advanced Chipset Features". AGP Aperture size should be 64, but refer to your video card manual to make sure. If it doesn't say, just set it to 64. Disable USB keyboard and mouse support. Disable sound and modem. Everything else should be fine.
Go to Peripherals. On-board Parallel Port I like to set at ECP/EPP Mode. You don't if you don't want to, but it speeds things up to me, especially if you have a parallel zip drive. Leave the other options that become available because of this, alone. Disable on-board audio. Everything else should be fine.
Power Management should be fine.
"PnP/PCI Configuration Setup" menu should be fine, but check your manual to see which setting is appropriate for Windows for the "PnP OS Installed" selection. If you don't know, just leave it as is.
Don't mess with the voltage menu. Just check it to see if whatever can be set to default or auto, is set to those. But don't change anything unless you know exactly what you're doing.
Now, save settings and exit. Assuming it boots fine, do a clean install of windows. Use the disk that came with your HDD to format/partition your drive. You'll lose all data on your HDD. Make sure you have a Windows98 startup disk first though. It might ask for this. If you don't have one and it asks for it, you'll really be up sh*t creek. Once you format your HDD, you won't be able to boot to it unless your HDD tools comes with an option to make it bootable. This doesn't really matter since all you have to do now is put your windows CD in your CD-ROM and follow those instructions. You'll need the full version of Windows for this, or a floppy setup disk from a previous version of windows as proof if you're using the Windows Upgrade. Once you have Windows installed, you can then start installing the other components, cards, etc. one-by-one. Remember to go through the BIOS to turn on sound, modem, etc., if that's where they are. Also, don't forget to install these all one-by-one in windows.
Once you've done all this (or if you run into problems again), post your results here so we can know how things turned out.
I hope this has been of help to you.
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