What would cause a new motherboard to not recognize any drives?

[Atlantean]

Friend of mine bought a new motherboard (asus a7n8x-e deluxe) and it will not recovnize any drives. It opens to some asus screen and says press tab to post. When you press tab it freezes on the post screen, can't even press delete to get into the motherboard options. I checked to make sure that he had everything hooked up properly and tried to get it to post without any drives connected but nothing, think he got another bad motherboard? I let him post on here with my account but he didn't get many replies... oh and also if it matters he is running a 120gb seagate sata drive and a 40gb wd ata drive, 1gb of ram and an ati 9800 pro video card.

 

[mechBgon]

Have him check that the keyboard isn't plugged into the mouse port or vice versa. Purple for keyboard, green for mouse.

Also have him check the jumper settings for the WD drive. If it's on its own data cable, it should be set for Single Drive, which is done by removing the jumper from the pins altogether.

Also, since I see this one coming next, he will need to set the BIOS to boot from "SCSI" if he wants the SATA drive to be the boot drive, and should set up Windows on it without the 40GB drive present so it can get drive letter C:.

 

[Atlantean]

Problem is he had the exact same thing running before, he had to rma the mobo and the vid card cause they were bad. So he already has windows setup on the drive, and probably won't set it up on the drive again... oh and processor he is running is 2500+ not overclocked at all. The keyboard and mouse were plugged into the correct ports, but I will get him to check the jumper settings on the WD drive, though should already be set to single drive because its the exact same setup he had before.

 

[mechBgon]

It could also be a systemic problem elsewhere, like having a standoff under the board in this location when the board has no corresponding hole there. Have him take the board out of the case and test it on cardboard next, as a fact-finding step.

Also, is the PSU a good-quality ~350W+ unit?

 

[boomerang]

Reset the CMOS. Follow the directions as stated in the motherboard manual. Just moving the jumper won't get the job done with a lot of boards today.

Or, he could reset the cosmos. Sorry, this is a semi-private joke for mechBgon. Please ignore.

 

[piasabird]

You may have already RMA'd your motherboard so I will just mention my experience with my Asus A7N8X Ultra 400 motherboard. When I connected the drives the motherboard would not post not matter what I did. So I reset the BIOS. According to the manaual it says to remove the battery.

This seemed to work but not quite. The Floppy was reading and the CDROM was reading but the IDE Hard Drive would not read. I changed the jumper on the hard drive from master to CS (Cable Select) and it worked just fine. I did not use SATA, so I can not comment on that.

I also used a PS2 Adapter instead of using the USB Keyboard. I like keyboards that are USB but come with the PS2 Adapter plug. On initial setup a PS2 Connected keyboard may work better.

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: boomerang
Reset the CMOS. Follow the directions as stated in the motherboard manual. Just moving the jumper won't get the job done with a lot of boards today.

Or, he could reset the cosmos. Sorry, this is a semi-private joke for mechBgon. Please ignore.

Bahahaaa! Let's have the electrons spin the other way this time, while we're at it.

 

[Tbirdkid]

do not put any of the drives on cable select. manually jumper them to their settings and go with it.