Need some computer help

[Frank Z]

I just bought an ASUS p5nd2 sli board to build a PC for my kids to use for school work and can not get the damn thing to boot up. I've installed an Intel P4 LGA775 CPU, 512mb Ram, Smartpower 2.0 500watt power supply (ATX 12v v2.0), and an ATI Radeon X300SE XTASY 16x PCI Express graphics card. I've tried 3 known good HDD's in the case and the damn thing WILL NOT BOOT UP!! I've checked and rechecked all of my connections and still nothing. I've gone through the BIOS and checked all the settings and the HDD is showing up in the BIOS as being the primary IDE....still nothing. I've tried booting from my Windows XP CD....nothing! What am I missing?

Oh, almost forgot...... WTF is a nVidia nForce 4 RAID?!?

Thanks for any help.

[karpiel666]

Do you have the cd drive set as primary boot device?

[Frank Z]

Floppy is the first boot device followed by CD, then HDD.

[SCompRacer]

nVidia nForce 4 RAID is a chipset that allows the use of multiple drives to make a Redundant Array of Independent Disks. This collection of drives offers increased performance and/or fault tolerance. RAID 0 is for speed, 1 is for redundancy, 0 + 1 is speed and redundancy.

If you had your drive(s) connected to this chipset, you would need a floppy with the chipset drivers copied to it set up with a proper root directory. You would need to load the drivers to allow XP setup to see the drives. (Thats why the 'press F6 to load additional drivers' flashes briefly at the bottom of the screen in the beginning of setup).

If I understand you correctly, your drive is connected to the large blue IDE connector on the board. BIOS sees the drive as primary. Your boot order is floppy, CD then HD. You would get a 'press any key to boot from CD' once a bootable CD is detected. How far do you get into XP setup after that?

EDIT: If you get to a point where setup says it can't find any drives, it will be a driver issue and you will have to do the F6 thing. The MB support CD will have a driver disk utiity to make one.

[Frank Z]

Figured out the RAID stuff late last night. I'm only installing one HDD so it's no longer a concern.

The computer won't boot from anything! I've tried booting from the HDD (it has WinXP already on it) and directly from the WinxP CD...nuttin'!! The only thing I see is a screen that tells me that the Windows did not shutdown properly and then gives me the option to start in SAFE Mode, Last Known Good Configuration, Normally......
I've tried every re-start option and still nuttin'.

[bobman1235]

Hmm. You say it recognizes your hard drive - does it recognize your CD-ROM? And when you try to boot from CD-ROM, does it give you the "press any key to boot from CD-ROM" message? The system is most likely going to act all kinds of crazy if you try to boot from a hard drive that was configured to run with a different system. Booting from the CD should at least get you into the setup, so I tend to think something about the CD is bad.

[Frank Z]

Hmm. You say it recognizes your hard drive - does it recognize your CD-ROM?

As far as I can tell it does not recognize the CD drive. I've tried two different known good drives and get squat, so no i don't get the standard "Press any Mutha-humpin' Key" message.....where'd I put my ^$@%@% axe!?!

[nadams]

The reason it's not booting off of your current install of windows is that the hard drive controller likely changed when you put in the new board. So, you have to at least do a repair install of Windows to get it up and running. The only way you can switch HD controllers in XP is if you load the drivers for the new controller BEFORE putting the primary drive on said controller. Other than that, you just have to repair.

Now, for the CDROM drive... are the jumpers set correctly? Drive should be set as master, and it should be the only device on the secondary chain. Then, in the BIOS, you should have the Secondary Master set to auto detect. If that doesn't work, try getting it to be picked up as a slave on the Master chain, maybe you have a bad secondary channel or something. Did you try different ribbon cables? Checked all connections to make sure they're squarely in place? (I've pulled ribbons out halfway and spent minutes wonder WTF was going on 'til I went back and checked _everything_)

[bobman1235]

Definitely sounds like a jumper problem on the CD-ROM - I usually just go with "cable select" to avoid any problems.