I'm not sure what the cause of your problem is, but you might want to check
to make sure that all your power connectors are firmly seated, especially
those for the drives.  Since you've been making a lot of changes inside the
case, it is easy to partially knock a power or data cable from making full
connection.

You might also want to go directly into the BIOS as you boot up and see what
is going on in the section that shows system temperatures.  This is always a
good idea when you first fire up a new system.  You'll want to make sure
that your heatsink is installed properly and cooling the CPU as it should.

As part of the trouble shooting procedure, you might want to try
disconnecting all the drives, except for the floppy, and booting into
Memtest to see if this makes any difference.

It might also be helpful to go ahead and reset the BIOS with the CMOS jumper
to make sure that you are working with default settings, which should be the
best to start with when troubleshooting.

Another thing to consider is disconnecting any non-essential motherboard
connections, such as front case or back expansion USB ports.

Finally, see if the manual has anything to say about which two memory slots
to use.  Some motherboards recommend that you use a particular pair of slots
to fill first and then use the other two for expansion.

This is a rather haphazard set of ideas, but I'm not sure what a most likely
culprit might be in this case.

John Sproule

----- Original Message -----
From: "Clay Shipley" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, March 05, 2005 3:30 PM
Subject: [PCBUILD] At wits end


>I recently finished my first complete build from the ground up.  I am using
>a ASUS P4R800V-Deluxe motherboard, Pentium 4 3.0 GHz processor, with a
>Western Digital 40 GB IDE HDD.  I also have a DVD ROM, CD-R/RW and Floppy
>from my old Gateway computer in it.  It's powered by a 450W power supply.
>At first I ran into some grounding problems with the board contacting the
>case, but resolved those, and have the computer booting up and posting
>fine.  I originally had 2 256 MB PC3200 DDR RAM from AMPO made from Wintec
>in the system.  I booted it up with the Windows ME startup disk, ran fdisk
>and format on the HDD just fine, I then inserted my Windows XP Update disk
>into the DVD-ROM drive and restarted it, it read the CD, began to load the
>files and when it got to the point when it said "starting windows", the
>computer just shut off without warning.  I trie
> d the same thing with the CD in the CD-R/RW drive and the same thing
> happened.  I then tried it with the jumper on the HDD on master, cable
> select, took the jumper completely off, no change.  I downloaded
> memtest86+ and made a boot disk out of it and ran that, and 1 or 2 seconds
> after the program loaded and began running it the computer shut off.  I
> tried it with each ram stick in the DIMM slot individually and it shut off
> sooner than it had with both.  Though, when I start up the computer and
> enter the BIOS it reads the RAM and displays the correct amount of memory.
> This lead me to believe perhaps the RAM was bad.  I then went out today
> and bought a PNY 512MB PC3200 DDR400 RAM and tried that running the
> memtest86+.  The test ran a couple seconds longer than it had with the
> other two sticks, but the computer still shut off.  I tried it in each
> DIMM slot and ran the test for each one and for some slots it ran longer
> than others, but inevitably at some point it shut off.

        The NOSPIN Group has added a new feature on our website,
           web based bulletinboard for questions and answers:
              Visit our sister website at http://nospin.com