New build, won't POST!!

K

kchinger

New Member
Ok. Here's what's happening. I can't flash the BIOS because I don't understand how to do it with a USB drive. I'm getting some floppy drives tomorrow. If it won't even POST, can I even flash it?

The video card seems to be working, when I plug the cable in, the monitor goes to sleep. If I unplug the cable, the monitor wakes up. It never shows anything but black. I get no beeps at all. My DVD drive won't eject or put lights on if I have the IDE cable plugged in. As soon as I unplug the IDE cable, it lights up and ejects like normal.

The stand-by power light is always on on the motherboard. When I turn the computer on, the Main Power On LED (on the motherboard as well) comes on and the stand-by light stays on. All the fans run. The D-bracket in the back is installed, but shows no lights at all. Neither green nor red. HDD sounds like it is spinning up. Reset button on the front of the case doesn't seem to work (could be plugged in wrong). I think that's about all I know.

Any suggestions?
 
Besides having some wires on wrong the hard drive being heard as well as fans running shows the power is correct. The problem could be the supply if not the board since you should seeing the green led if the power is adequate.

First try another supply and inspect all connections by review of the board's diagram in the user manual it comes with before assuming a board fault of some type. If the supply is good the lack of a default post beep suggests a bad board.
 
^^If you're talking about the green Main Power LED on the motherboard, that one shows up. If you're talking about the D-Bracket green LED, you're correct. Nothing shows up on the D-Bracket.


I shorted across the reset switch jumpers, nothing happened. I unplugged the power cable from the video card to test voltages, and it made a long high-pitched LOUD continuous beep until I shut it down again. I unplugged my wireless adapter, my HDD, my IDE cable, all USB slots and IEEE 1394 slots and audio connections. I went to the bare minimum and just tried to get it to post to rule things out. No post.

Some problems that I've read about with these boards... (I don't know how accurate they are, just what people have said in reviews)

They only supported PCI Express 1.0 and not 1.1 which is required for 8800 series.
They don't support 45 nm. Most people say they will if you update bios.
A lot of them are DOA.
Something about a poorly placed cap behind the CPU that is prone to breaking/shorting.
Incorrect D-bracket readings, or none at all.
Picky about memory.

I'm running A.Data memory, DDR2 800. 250 GB 7200 RPM Barracuda HDD. E8400 CPU. EVGA 8800 GT 512 video card. Rosewill cooler. 600W Extreme PSU.

Help me please. I would REALLY like to get this working and don't want to wait on RMA if I can get it fixed up.

I'm buying some floppy disks tomorrow, so I will attempt to follow some instructions I found online (unless you can recommend some good ones) to flash the BIOS to the newest version.

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated. Thanks.
 
If the board is toast like it sounds then trying to flash the bios would be pointless. With only the supplly, video ard, and monitor no post and a loud continous beep however seems to point more at the cpu rather then board since the board is telling you something there.

The green led indicates there's enough power ruling the supply out anyways with the continous beep heard. What make and model is the board there? Even not knowing a single constant beep doesn't sound good.
 
MSI P6N Platinum. I'm going to try taking everything out of the case, laying it on cardboard, re-seating everything, and then see what happens. Since this CPU isn't technically supported, I thought it might not post without having flashed the memory to the newest one that supports this CPU.
 
Ok. Here's an update. I took everything out, double checked the seating of the CPU (seemed fine to me), reseated the heatsink/fan. The only problem I noticed was that I used two different types of standoffs behind the motherboard, so when I put it back in I'll use all the same type. I was having some trouble with crossthreading and the board not sitting quite right, and I think this was why.

I took it all out, and hooked it up with just one stick of RAM and nothing unnecessary on some cardboard. Same old stuff. Then I tried the other stick of RAM. Nothing. So I tried my old PSU. Nothing.

The speaker cable wouldn't reach the way I had the case sitting, so I decided to just use my voltmeter to see if it was beeping, I've never heard it beep except that one really loud continuous one when the video card wasn't plugged in. So I put my volt meter across the speaker terminals on the board, jumped across the power switch with a screwdriver... and the voltage on the speaker jumped to about 5 volts briefly. It seems like it's trying to beep once very short upon startup, but I never heard it. So I plugged the speaker back in and tried. I never heard the beep, but I could see it with my voltmeter. I had my ear about 4 inches from the speaker trying to listen.

With it on the cardboard I plugged in the D-bracket, and never got any lights from it, as usual. I tried shorting across the reset button again as well, still nothing there either.

So, that's where I currently stand.

DOA Mobo? Any other testing I could do before I send it back?

Thanks,
Kai
 
Ok. I've decided to RMA the board. I'm trying to talk newegg into charging me for another board, shipping it overnight tomorrow for free, and then I'll send this one back and get my refund. Hopefully without restocking fees, and without too much (if any) shipping expense. They'll probably get back to me sometime tomorrow.

We'll see. I'll update when I get the board and get it all back together. Hopefully this is the only problem.
 
I hope that will solve it for you. Too bad you didn't have an addon speaker for boards you could use there since you were seeing a voltage spike at post time. Those simply plug in on the same or second block of pins for the additional usb ports.

The review on the board is good. PCSTATS at http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=2099 But it may still turn out to be something besides the board itself.

AMI (American Megatrends International) BIOS Beep Codes.AMI BIOS uses beeps of the same length and pitch. The error is displayed as a number of beeps. For example, 4 beeps indicated a timer failure. BEEP CODE MEANING POSSIBLE CAUSE 1 Beep (No video) Memory refresh failure Bad memory
http://www.amptron.com/html/bios.beepcodes.html


Explanation: The system is having a problem accessing the system memory to refresh it. Refreshing is done on all system memory to keep its contents active.
Diagnosis: This code usually means a problem either with the system memory or with the motherboard itself. http://www.pcguide.com/ts/x/sys/beep/ami.htm

That model sees an AMI bios there while these are still generalized being old pages seen at the links there. If you had other memory onhand that would certainly tell fast.
 
Yeah. I considered memory. I don't have any other memory that will fit. The fact that the D-bracket fails to light up makes me think motherboard more than memory.
 
Ok. New board is on it's way now. I called them up and talked them into sending me a shipping label for this one, and waiving the re-stocking fee, and then I would just buy a new board and pay my own shipping for that one. So I followed everyone's advice from before (after doing more research) and went with the Gigabyte P35-DS3L. It was cheaper than the board I am returning, and I've since decided I probably won't do SLI. I'll just be buying a new computer by then anyway probably. I got two-day shipping, should be here Wednesday afternoon. I'll update when I get it all put together and hopefully running again. Then I'll get my pictures up of all the case mods and everything. Uggh. DOA stuff sucks. Oh well.
 
Did you try just one stick of ram in the third slot? That quite often works, this problem occurs on newish mobos after transit...

Are all fans etc going?
 
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No beep code or the default single short beep at post being heard wouldn't be memory problem but generally either the board or supply. The supply is working it appears as normal leaving the board as the chief suspect.

Hopefully you will see a good replacement come in since you went with a different model. A friend saw two boards in a row that were doa when tried and waited for thethird being a different model to see a working system. The vendor at the time stated they probably received a bad batch.
 
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