[CBMilewski]

I decided to build my own computer for the first time just for the satisfaction of doing so and knowing everything that's going into it. Since I've never done it before (and I've been waiting for my tax return to afford it) I've done everything I can think of to prepare myself. So the time came and here's what I ordered for my computer:

ASUS M2N32 SLI Deluxe Wireless Edition
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+
2x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2 800MHz
EVGA nVidia 7950 GT 512MB PCI-E
Western Digital Caviar SE 250GB SATA
Antec SMARTPOWER 2.0 500W
Sony IDE DVD-ROM
Sony IDE DVD-RW
Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit

I put it all together being extremely careful about static and I even bought a couple extra fans to put in the case. First time I turn it on it boots perfectly, I go right to the BIOS to make sure that everything looks good. It detected and identified everything I had in there so I rebooted with the Vista disc in to install the OS. The disc loaded up fine and I answered all the pre-install questions it asked. It started to install but halfway through it stopped and gave me an error message about it being unable to update the registry because certain files were missing or currupt. It also gave me the error code 0x80070017. I tried to look this up but all i got were people compaining about having this problem when they were trying to install the release candidate 1. Not to mention they had mostly burnt it themself but i actually bought mine. At this point i tried a few basic things like upgrading the BIOS to the lastest version and installing the latest SATA drivers (they were even for Vista 64) before the install but i kept getting the same result. After so many tries it started randomly freezing at any point in the pre-install questions. Later i realized it wasnt freezing it was taking a really long time to get anywhere. At this point i was beginning to believe that i may have gotten a bad copy of Vista.

Next thing i tried was to install XP pro to see if it would take that. I got through all the DOS based portion of the install but when it rebooted to do the actual installation it wouldnt go past the "Press any key to boot from the CD...." screen. I didnt touch anything and it stayed in that screen with a couple random colored rectangles on the screen. I rebooted from that point and the same thing happened. Now im thinking either the hard drive is bad or the SATA controller on the motherboard is bad.

I pulled the IDE hard drive out of my old computer which has XP Pro on it and plug it into an IDE slot on the new motherboard. When i turned it on it would reboot right before it gets to the "Windows XP" screen everytime. One time i even saw the "Windows XP" for an instant before it rebooted.

Now I'm completely lost. I tried swapping all the cables in my case with ones i wasnt using and that didn't change anything. That's all i can think of now, if anybody has any possible idea or anything i can try to figure out what the problem is i would really appreciate it.

Thanks for reading my novel
- Chris

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Hi there. This may/may not sound a stupid question, but did you apply Heat Sink Compound to the processor when installing the heatsink? Can you open the case to verify that all fans are spinning? Can you physically hear the hard drive loading up when you restart the computer during installation?

[Spider-Man]

Hi there. This may/may not sound a stupid question, but did you apply Heat Sink Compound to the processor when installing the heatsink? Can you open the case to verify that all fans are spinning? Can you physically hear the hard drive loading up when you restart the computer during installation?

[CBMilewski]

I'm not considering anything a stupid question at this point. I did buy my own heat-sink compound with the computer but when i opened the stock heat-sink i saw that AMD had pre-applied their own compound. I installed the heat-sink with their compound and even monitored the cpu temperature in the BIOS and it was holding a steady 45-49 degrees celsius. I did make sure all the fans were running also. I could never hear the hard drive spin up becuase of the fans but i can feel it vibrating and i have sucessfully formatted it using a bootable disc i got from the western digital website.

I also have a bootable diagnostic disc that i got a few months ago and ran some tests and here are my results:

1. I ran Mersenne Prime Test V23.5.2 which is a CPU test for 2 hours and got 0 errors and 0 warnings.
2. I ran Memtest86 V3.3 which is a RAM test all the way through and it passed 100% of the tests.

I dont know much about these tests or if theyre even the best ones for me to run but that's what i got as results. I'm gonna try to run more and see what else i get.

Thanks again for reading my post!

[CBMilewski]

Turns out I had a faulty hard drive.