I thought I should confirm my suspicion before I took any further action on this recent problem. I recently upgraded a 200 GB HD and Video Card on my AMD based PC.

I upgraded the HD first, but left the old 40GB drive in as slave. Mind you this involved moving both my drives onto an ATA100 PCI card (came with the new WD HD)that supported 137GB+ drives. All was well.

Then I upgraded to an ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 64MB graphics card and all was well.

Then I removed the slave 40GB HD as planned to put in another system but it then would not boot. It would simply power down within a few seconds of my powering it up. I put the old drive back and all was ok again!

I then proceeded to reinstall the device drivers that came with the 200GB HD to be sure these were present on the new boot drive.
 This seemed to fix the problem.

However, about a week later, I had to borrow the ATI Vid card to troubleshoot another PC. As soon as I put it back in, the power down on power up problem came back again.

Now, I thought it might be the Video Card instead of the drive, so I put my old video card back in and all is ok!

Ok!!! Now this does not make sense, right? First it was fixed by drivers on the disk drive, now it is the vid card?!?!?! So, I thought I would retest the assumptions: I put the new Video card back in and simply unplugged the Disk Drive to see if I would get it to stay up, print BIOS bootup on screen, etc. Guess what?? IT DID!!!!

One other interesting detail: When I power up the PC in its ailing state, I can hear the HD making a lot of repiticous hisses that sound like it is just flexing the RW heads back and forth, back and forth... until it powers off.

So, now I am of the belief
that this has nothing specifically to do with the HD or the Vid card, since they both work perfectly independently of each other.

Now what?
1. Flaky power supply? I cannot think of any other reason it would power off automatically and so quickly.
2. What about moving the ATA100 card to another PCI slot? Does BIOS shut power down if something conflicts at that level? I did not think that it would power down in such cases. My experience is it would simply disable one or the other and at least get past BIOS bootup, mem check, etc...

Any other ideas. Please help!

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