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Comp won't boot. Help please.

C

CANiSLAYu

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Mar 13, 2000
Messages
6,667
My bro's computer is giving me a headache. Background info:

I'm not clear on what the initial problem was (as it's not my comp and my bro wasn't very clear). But it wasn't loading Windows and he was unable to reformat & reinstall Windows.

I recently upgraded my hard drives, so I passed on my old ones to him (a WD 120GB/8MB and a Seagate 120GB/8MB).

Specs:
Antec TruePower 330w
ABIT IS7
Pentium 4 2.0A
2x 512MB generic PC3200
128MB ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
SB Audigy 1
The above hard drives
CDRW and DVD ROM drive

Brought it down to bare minimum (mobo/cpu/1 stick of RAM/1 hdd/1 optical), cleared the CMOS, and tried to install windows. As it is copying files, it BSODs and mentions something about systemdd.sys.

I tried both sticks of RAM (1 at a time) in each slot. Even got a 512MB stick of PC2700 from another computer and tried that in every slot. Tried both hard drives, tried brand new IDE cables and tried the hard drive in both IDE channels on the mobo, tried 2 different XP CDs. Same BSOD every time.

None of the parts are brand new (meaning they were all working at some point), but the computer as a whole hasn't been together long (maybe early late Nov, early Dec). Any help is greatly appreciated.
 
Well, you've already done almost everything you could do...

-Make sure CPU, Vid card, motherboard cooling fans all running correctly. Replace and or/clean out dust bunnies.

-Make sure the mb isnt shorting out somewhere on the case. It could be something relatively inconsequential like a trace to the floppy drive connector and when the code tries to access that subsystem it could be crashing the system.

-Try another power supply? Maybe this one took a hit and isnt running 100% clean anymore.

-Try another video card. Hey, who knows... <shrug>

-Are you running the newest bios? (Or try an older version, if you upgraded it recently and now the problem is happening)

-Did you go through everything in the bios to make sure that something obscure wasnt set really wrong?

-Double check the thermal paste on the heatsink? (if you didnt install the cpu, or did it in a rush, when drunk, etc) maybe it is missing or too little or way too much, cheap stuff that dried out, etc. Or is it using a lame thermal pad?

-Try setting everything ultra-conservative in the bios (underclock cpu, set super slow memory timings, turn off serial, parallel, usb, anything else not needed). The windows NT/2k/XP installer is somewhat sensitive... and will sometimes fail on 1% iffy hardware when windows will run fine. (Though each version has gotten better about this...)



Outside of that, you're probably down to trying another MB or cpu... :( Good luck
 
It's the same BIOS that shipped with the motherboard. Guess the next step is to completely take it apart and clean everything and build it again from the ground up and try a different video card and PSU. Other than that I suppose it has to be the MB :-/
 
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