New motherboard giving me trouble

defl8or

Baseband Member
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Hi, I recently bought a new motherboard/processor/ram and installed them in my old case with my old power supply, graphics card and drives. (All makes and models at the end of this post) Upon trying to start it up, I got the blue screen of death and tried reinstalling windows XP, which solved the problem. (I took out one 4GB stick of ram prior to this install, so I can't rule out bad RAM as a cause of the earlier problem) I then decided to install windows 7 64 bit to take advantage of the 8GB of RAM that came with the board. The install worked fine and the computer was usable for maybe 20 minutes before I got the BSOD. I couldn't even reinstall off the dvd as I was caught in a never ending loop ending in blue screens every time. I'd heard of sketchy RAM causing such problems, so I took out one stick and it all worked fine. To see if it was the RAM or the socket or MOBO, I tried the other stick, which also worked fine. Either stick worked in either socket, but not both together. (They are the same make and model and both came with the board) Anyway, I checked the Bios version of the MOBO and it was over a year old, so I thought I'd update on the offchance that that would fix my problem. I downloaded the latest version and used that neat little EZ Flash (or whatever it's called) that Asus has to update my bios. I ok'd everything, then got a screen asking if I wanted to use the default bios settings, or something. (I think it was "enter bios and screw around" or some shiz) I figured the default would be fine and I would come back to it later if needed. Anyway, the computer booted up fine and was working normally so I powered it down to put in the other stick of RAM. Now, when I try to power it up, the power comes on, but that's it. The monitor doesn't power up, there's no hard drive activity going on, and I can't even turn the computer off without ripping the power cord out of the back. I tried going back to one stick of RAM, but the same thing happens and all I can think of is that somewhere I missed saving the new BIOS and now it's blank. However, if there was a message asking if I wanted to save the new BIOS, I know I would have clicked yes. I'm sure there was such a message, but I don't remember. So now I seem to have a braindead computer. Any suggestions?

Oh, the new MOBO is Asus M5A78L-MLX V2
The processor is an AMD FX-4170 (If I remember rightly) the RAM is 1333mhz DDR3 but I can't make out the model or manufacturer.
If it matters, the old stuff already in the case is an ATI HD 4600 Graphics card, a WD 10,000rpm 78GB Raptor hard drive (And I've had 3 of those die on me) and some random power supply that I think is good for 750 watts.
 
Try clearing the cmos, unplug your computer and take out the button cell battery.

When you start up, just have 1 stick of ram installed.
 
Tried it. Also tried replacing the RAM. The hard drive is not spinning up at all, so I swapped the SATA cable. I wonder if it's the drive...? It just seems weird that the drive died right when I was having unrelated problems. Too many issues going on at once making it hard to diagnose.
 
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