Trouble While Building My Computer

F

Farnsworth

New Member
Recently, as a christmas gift to my brother, I've been putting putting together a gaming computer. After about two days of work, I had finished putting the computer itself together along with all of the necessary wiring. Upon starting it up, I put in the installation disc for Windows 7, and began installing. About halfway through the installation, a window came up saying an error had occurred, and that I needed to restart the computer. After restarting, it just went back to the same window. I tried booting the OS disc and other driver discs from the CD drive to see if that might help, but none of them would work since windows was already partly installed. I've tried nuking the HDD in order to start over, but it won't boot up.

Because the computer has been on for decent periods of time and has yet to crash even once, I'm inclined to say that this isn't a hardware problem. I may be wrong, but if anyone can give me advice on what steps to take next, I'd be very appreciative.

System specs:
- Processor: Intel Core i7-920 Bloomfield 2.66GHz
- MoBo: ASRock X58 Extreme LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel
- RAM: Crucial 2GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1066 (x2)
- PSU: KINGWIN ABT-730MM 730W ATX 12V Ver.2.91 SLI
- Graphics: MSI N275GTX TwinFrozr OC GeForce GTX 275
- HDD: Western Digital Caviar Blue WD6400AAKS 640GB 7200 RPM 16MB
- Case: NZXT Guardian 921 CS-NT-GD921-B Black Steel ATX Mid Tower
- CD/DVD Drive: LITE-ON Black 22X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 8X DVD+R DL
 
Sounds like you just might need to restart the Windows installation. I'm betting you can't boot from the OS disc because your CD drive isn't set to be the primary boot drive. You'll need to change that in your BIOS settings.
 
Okay, I switched the CD drive to be the primary boot drive and restarted the installation. It was in the middle of expanding the windows files, and the screen just went black. I'd normally guess that it's just the computer restarting as it often does during OS installations, but the computer itself is still turned on.
 
Well, start it again. If the same thing happens again, I would try using a different video card if you have one available. At this point, there are many possible sources of your problem.
 
Farnsworth said:
Well, I haven't installed any of the graphics or mobo drivers yet, could that be the problem?
Click to expand...

Nope. There's no way you could have those drivers installed before installing the OS. Assuming that this wasn't a fluke and you get the same problem again, it would almost definitely be a hardware problem. In order of likeliness, I would say that it could be the video card, power supply, or motherboard.
 
Okay, I tried starting it up again, and the system crashed before getting to the installation screen. I tried one more time and it crashed even earlier. At the moment I think I'm just going to take it to a local computer rescue store on Monday.
 
Given that it's crashing earlier, it seems like it could be an overheating problem. Are you positive that your CPU is installed correctly? Make sure that you've applied thermal paste correctly and the heat-sink has been installed correctly.
 
Okay, I've resecured the CPU fan, and it isn't crashing anymore. The windows installation is still just going black when at 0% for Expanding Windows Files
 
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