GA-P45-DS3L hang issues

[Kett]

So I am helping a friend build his first serious PC and the parts he decided to go with are basically as follows:

CPU: Q9450
Mobo: GA-P45-DS3L Rev 1.0 (Shipping BIOS F3)
RAM: 2x2gb OCZ 800
GPU: 8800GT
PSU: OCZ Stealthstream 600w

1x IDE Optical
1x IDE HDD
2x SATA HDD

In the last couple of days i've been helping him through the build and yesterday we tried booting the thing up for him. We put his XP Pro cd in the drive, posted fine, verifying dmi pool data......, boot from cd/dvd.... and.... hang.

Nothing I can think of seems to be able to fix this problem. I feel like it should be an easy fix of something dumb that I am hopefully not thinking of, but I have pretty much exhausted every troubleshooting tactic I can think of short of RMAing the board.

Loosely organized in ascending-desperateness-order, I have:
-Shuffled/isolated boot devices in the bios
-Tried various different bootable CDs
-Checked the cabling and connections
-Checked the jumpers on the IDE for proper master/slave settings
-Tried various optical devices and HDDs
-Isolated the various devices (When just an optical drive is hooked up, it will actually get to the point of saying "Boot failed, please insert a disk and press a key" etc. and repeatedly refuse to acknowledge any boot disk in the drive; When a SATA HDD + Optical or just a SATA HDD are hooked up, it freezes right where it says "Verifying DMI Pool Data......" and goes no further, and when an IDE HDD + Optical are hooked up it has identical behaviour to the first situation)
-Cleared the CMOS
-Flashed the bios to several different versions including F4 and F7
-Tried enabled/disabling various combinations of bios options relating to the SATA/IDE controllers.
-Disabled all non-essential onboard integrated peripherals
-Tried freeing up IRQs, assigning the IDE controller its own IRQ
-unplugged every useless/non-essential peripheral from the system
-Tried isolating RAM sticks because why not.

I have not yet tried killing myself, but am strongly feeling that it is a wise next step. Please someone tell me it's just something dumb I missed? I really don't want to force my friend to have to deal with RMAing a motherboard on his first build. I can't seem to dig up any results searching online for a solution to this issue; most people seem to have similar errors but almost everyone who hangs in this spot is doing it after they've installed windows successfully or otherwise managed to actually boot something from a drive of some sort.

Any ideas? Anyone have similar issues that they solved?

 

[jasondean98]

Just a thought but is the DRAM Voltage set correctly, the default for the board is 1.8v which may be too low!

 

[Zybortrix]

Aside from the good advice concerning DRAM voltage, and this is a stab in the dark but i've come across it before. . . if you have another optical drive, preferably IDE, try installing windows from that.

I can't really justify my point here as it's a bit of a mystery to me too, but i've come across this issue before although every time it's happened to me its been an Nvidia chipset and a SATA optical on XP.

After XP is installed i could replace the IDE drive with the SATA drive and experience no further trouble.

I know it's weird and i know the chipset in your friends build is Intel but between suicide and trying an IDE drive, i'd try the IDE.

Kill yourself only if that doesn't work.

 

[Kett]

Just a thought but is the DRAM Voltage set correctly, the default for the board is 1.8v which may be too low!

Yes, I did actually try setting it to the ram's default which is 1.9, as well as to 2.0.
Forgot to list that.

One thing I haven't tried is underclocking the entire system; though at this point I am doubtful that will do anything.

if you have another optical drive, preferably IDE, try installing windows from that.

Kill yourself only if that doesn't work.

Unfortunately I can't try that because the optical I am using is already an IDE.
I suppose I could try the reverse and pull a SATA opty out of my system to see if it made a difference or not.