SOLVED: Troubleshooting my new PC.

freakish light

Ok, so I just finished putting together my system, my first one that I've done from scratch, and I've hit a snag. All the power stuff comes on ok, it gets through POST and BIOS... and then I get a blinking cursor. I tried configuring my boot order, tried manually selecting a boot device, but it just sits there at the damn blinking cursor.

I don't know what to do at this point except secure the connections. Any ideas of what went wrong?

noweat

you're trying to install the OS now and it won't boot off the cd? or are you past that now?

Ego

OK, unplug any USB drives if you've got any hooked up (some motherboards do exactly that when they come to a thumb-drive or external HD, you have to plug them in after boot / update your USB and chipset drivers if this is the case.) As asked, is this after the OS installation? If it is and the OS in question is XP, I'd say you need updated SATA drivers (alternatively you could use the win7 beta.) Are your hd and optical drive IDE, or SATA? If this is pre-OS install, do you get a proper error message when your hd's and optical drive are disconnected, or the same blinking cursor? (corrupt BIOS can do it.) And, while it's a long shot, is your CPU configuration set properly in the BIOS?

Sorry for all the questions, but it'll help narrow things down.

edit: Also, if the optical and hard drive are both SATA, try them individually to check that they both work and also make sure you don't have them connected to ports that your mobo assigns for RAID use (my mobo is like this, the first set are for hardware RAID and the second set are what you need to use for non-RAID drives.)

freakish light

I found the problem. For some reason the system wasn't reading my IDE CD drives. I went to Best Buy, got a SATA drive, and now Windows installation is proceeding normally.

Dark Shroud

Unless it's blu-ray I hope you didn't pay more than $40 for that drive.

freakish light

It's the price of convenience. I know what drives are worth, but a working computer is far more important to me than $50.

noweat

if you've got time to burn, you could probably get it to work by setting the master/slave switch.

Dark Shroud

I do understand that, I usually try to get BB to price match. I just don't like paying a "convenience" fee of more than $10 for an item.

It's your PC & money so as long as you're happy I guess.

freakish light

noweat wrote: »

if you've got time to burn, you could probably get it to work by setting the master/slave switch.

I set the switch to master, slave, and cable-select on the main one and it was always gave me the same result. I guess SATA and IDE just don't play nice together.