[schmidi]

Hi all,
First off, thanks for a place to ask these kind of questions. I am building my first computer, though I have had many years of os tweaking and card installing by means of audio recording and some gaming. Unfortunately, I have hit a wall that hopefully you guys can help me get over!

I have the following components installed-
Gigabyte GA-G33M-DS2R mobo bios v.F3
E2140 CPU
2x1 2gb Crucial Ballistix ddr2 800
WD 80gb SATA 3g/sec HD (OS AND PROGS)
Seagate 320gb SATA 3g/sec HD (AUDIO RECORDING)
Apex tx381 case with Allied 300w psu
1 old ide cdrom drive
1 old ide fdd

Upon my initial power ups, the system posted fine, all HDs and RAM recognized as well as CPU and all fans spun up. I was able to go through bios and temps were nice at 25c for CPU and 42c for CASE.

I then restarted and inserted xp for installation, but realized I did not have my keyboard connected So, powered off and connected it. Start up again, posted fine, got about 20 seconds into windows setup....WHOLE THING SHUTS OFF AND THEN REBOOTS. It just keeps doing this now after it has run for about 45 seconds.

I then tried booting with a different keyboard...only 1 stick of ram...the other stick of ram, 1 HD, no HDs, re-applying arctic silver5, and so on and the thing still resets. I have even reset the CMOS jumper, taken out the battery...no luck.

is it a dead board...bad psu? HELP!

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Hi there schmidi, and welcome to Geeks to Go!

First off, I don't know of Allied as a PSU brand, and 300w isn't very much power. I strongly recommend upgrading your PSU anyway, whether it is at fault or not.

Have you run memtest86 on all the RAM modules? Separately and together?

There are some BIOS updates available for that motherboard.

My biggest concern is, of course, that you are using an old cdrom drive. These often fail after a few years. I strongly recommend you try using a different optical drive to install windows. You can buy a new DVD Burner for about $30, they are nice and cheap.

[Troy]

Hi there schmidi, and welcome to Geeks to Go!

First off, I don't know of Allied as a PSU brand, and 300w isn't very much power. I strongly recommend upgrading your PSU anyway, whether it is at fault or not.

Have you run memtest86 on all the RAM modules? Separately and together?

There are some BIOS updates available for that motherboard.

My biggest concern is, of course, that you are using an old cdrom drive. These often fail after a few years. I strongly recommend you try using a different optical drive to install windows. You can buy a new DVD Burner for about $30, they are nice and cheap.

[schmidi]

Thanks for your reply. Well I'm gonna run over to office max cause I saw a 500w antec on sale and see if that is my problem. Also, I noticed some light scratches in the metal surface of the cpu cooler. Could that cause a problem even if adaquate AS5 has been applied?

[cmw2010]

Those scratches won't hurt anything, the Arctic Silver will fill those in when you fasten the heatsink. I think ruthandtroy set you on the right path with the power supply, cheap power supplies cause a lot of problems like the one that you are describing.

[schmidi]

Thanks again guys! I am happy to say that it looks like the P-o-SU was the culprit. Got a 500w antec basiq and im am currently formatting my os drive!

One thing I did notice was it said my other HD was detected at 170gb when in reality it is 320gb. I am assuming there is something I need to change in bios or windows, any clues? I have never ran a system with SATA HD's before. I currently have them plugged in on sata0 and sata1 on the board. Do I need to move them around ie: sata0 and sata2 ports?

Thanks again guys!

[Troy]

Antec is a good brand, glad to hear you got a good brand, and also glad to hear that it has solved your problems. It shouldn't matter where the SATA ports are connected, because you order them in the BIOS for your computer to deal with.

I'm not exactly sure about the hard drive size, but I have heard of that problem before, so it should be easily fixable, whatever it is. I would think cmw2010 might know the answer?