Hello, I'm having a lot of trouble getting my computer to work. I'm going to do my best to be thorough so pardon the length of what I'm about to spew. Also please pardon any spelling mistakes as I'm typing this on an iPod.
The problem in a nutshell:
I bought a New motherboard which will not boot even into bios. First it didnt, then It did, but then was inconsistent and has now stopped booting to bios at all
The history
My computer was working just fine a week ago and (with my old motherboard) as far as I could tell. If it weren't for the fact that I noticed that my Sata backup drive was no longer showing up in windows i wouldnt have opened up the computer, blew out the dust, reseated the sata connector, and proceeded to start the computer again. At this point the computer suddenly wouldn't complete the boot into windows vista - it would boot up until the round vista logo showed up then hang. Checking bios showed recognition of the sata harddrive. Booting into safe mode worked fine as well as loading the backup sata drive and all files on it. I so i tried booting with all drives but c: unhooked and no usb devices plugged in - and suddenly the computer wouldnt even boot!!! No beeps, no post, nothing on the screen, no bios, no lights on keyboard, but all fans and lights on mobo working fine.
At this point I deemed the mono bad, it had always acted "funny": was very old, and I had reason to believe it had some electrical problems in the past. So I ordered a "new" mobo from eBay. According to the in-good-standing seller on eBay the mobo was in tested in perfect workin order. Also, in this process i tested the c: by booting to Spinrite 6 cd and discovered that the c: hard disk was faulty- bad sectors, etc- couldn't even finish scan. So I also got a new hard drive from newegg. Then a friend came over and did the trick of reseating the RAM and it booted again! It also booted into windows just fine! I could have went on using the computer as usual from this point but since I had already ordered the new mobo an the hard drive was going bad I decided to start over anyway.
So I hooked up the new motherboard, and same ram, CPU, power supply, cpu fan, and graphics card as before. I Rubbed off old heatsink compound from CPU and heatsink with a coffee filter, applied grain-of-rice-sized dot of Fanner Group fanner 420 heatsink compound to the center ( thermal conductivity: >7.5W/m-k, thermal resistance: >0.06 C-in^2/W) and applied heatsink. I only hooked up the new hard drive and the ps2 keyboard. I hooked up the power sw, reset sw, and HD led to the motherboard per the Manuel. When I went to start the pc, it wouldn't boot! Same thing as before. No bios, no lights on keyboard, nothing on screen, all fans and lights normal on the motherboard. I looked at the manual and confirmed that the ram was inserted correctly into the motherboard slots. At this point I only had one stick in. I also cleared the bios by removing the battery and doing the jumper reset. Nothing made any difference.
Finally I read that having the reset sw connected to the motherboard in reverse might cause problems, so I flipped it. And this fixed the problem!!!! The computer booted into the bios just fine!! I shut it down then inserted all the ram, all the pci cards, and all the hard drives And cd drives i wanted with the new system. Booted to bios again perfectly and I verified that all hard drives were recognized and that all the ram was recognized and showin the correct speeds. I did not change any other settings except put the cd as boot priority over hard drive.
So I put in the windows vista x64 cd that I had installed my last system successfully with, booted to it, and it did the white loading bar across the bottomthat said "loading windows files" it got the whole wAY to 100% and stopped! Wierd I thought, tried it again, same thing. So I tried using my vista 32bit cd to boot... Same thing!! So I unhooked all extra hard drives but the main empty sata, unhooked all pci cards, all USB devices, made sure only the master cd drive was still attached. Went to boot and guess what- back to the same no booting, no bios, no keyboard lights, but all fans running, etc. Somewhere in the process of trying to boot to the vista cd I used the restart button for the mobo- I'm not sure if this could have contributed to any of this, just thought I'd mention it. I unplugged the computer and waited for a half hour or more, then came back and tried again and it booted but just would not bring up the boot to cd dialog. Then it juat stopped booting at all. Since then I have tried everything I can think of and it will not boot or show the bios, reseating the graphics card and ram 8 times, clearing the bios battery and jumper again, checked the CPU seating and that it was clean and all pins were there, took the motherboard out of the case and hooked it up not against metal, tried all sticks of ram one at a time in all four ram slots, ESP the one noted for only one stick in the manual. For everything I mentioned above I always remembered to ground myself on the computer case before touching the parts.
So WHAT ELSE CAN I CHECK? what else could be going on here? After hours and days of reading over what I can find on the Internet, I'm finally breaking down and asking for help! I would really love any advice or guidance on how to proceed from here. Thank you so much for any input you can share.
The system:
CPU: amd athlon 64 single core 3200+
New mobo: asus an8-e
Graphics card: nvidia evga geforce 7800 GT pci-e
Ram: 2 sticks of 1gb each DDR 400 corsair valueselect ram
2 sticks of 1 gb each super talent ram
Power supply: 600watt st60f SilverStone Strider Continuous
