Building a new computer

[keithster]

Actually I'm confused. Even if I don't know much about bios, according to what you just said about setting it to pci. My computer is reading it off of pci and the motherboard has no vga (or at least no vga plug-ins).

Oh yeah, just to clarify again that I can't boot up my computer from it being built upon scratch. So The OS is not even loaded up nor is my hard drive formatted. There are no beeps on my computer saying that it's alive or errors.

What's weird for me when I shut down my computer to mess with it the next day, it doesn't take a few seconds of holding down the button to shut it off, at least not on my last computer which was built in the same tower. The moment that press it, it shut off instantly. I'm not too sure if that sounds weird to you, but it was different for me.

How long have you guys been messing with computers?

I just wanted to play games.

 

[dgorner]

so you have a new hard drive?

 

[keithster]

Yep.
The only difference about this hard drive is that it was actually use as a secondary drive. Still there was nothing on it and I also switched it to 'Master' instead of 'slave'.
I also tried this on another hard drive I have and it did the same thing. So I assume it's not the hard drive.

Also I found some other interesting news. I went and bought another motherboard at Fry's Electronic. It wasn't a very good board, but it was the ONLY board (Sheesh) that they have for my needs. Took home and installed it in. Now usually they don't have pictures of the board you are getting, but the one that I got was horrible or either that I can't follow directions. There was no basic audio pins for clicks and beeps from the computer, there was no POWER LED pins, and again they have no VGA pins for monitors. I was **** confused. Even when my computer ran, I believe that there was a 'CMOS error' during the boot status.

At that time, I came to the point where I think it's just me. This project is a little difficult for me. But I never had any trouble with my older computers that I built before. Maybe I'm suppose to do something different when it comes to PCI Exp.

 

[dgorner]

so what is this new board that you bought?, i have a asrock939 dual sata2, it has both pcie 16x and pcie1x and agp 8x slots, in your bios you have it set to pcie im sure, and are you booting up at all? you are also going to have to change boot sequence in your bios to read, boot from cd first , you are loading win xp right?, put your win xp cd in and boot up you should get pre test screen and then it should load from cd. but again what board did replace that tul with?. i want to look it up. give name and model number. talk to you soon.

 

[dgorner]

oh yeah ive been building computers for 13.5 years, started with a packard bell 150mhz, paid 3000.00 for it when it first came out after finaceing from sears.

 

[keithster]

Isn't that silly. That computer that was 150mhz was about a good 10-15 years ago. I use to have a packard bell 100mhz computer like that.

I forgot the specific board that I bought. But from what ECS website gave me, this is the only card that I can remember it by. It is a N-Force Card.

ECS Motherboard

With this motherboard, I was able to get to by bios, but if I skipped that part, it will go blank, not a complete blank to where it not recieving signals. The WinXP automatic setup program doesn't even start.

Oh yeah, about the boot sequence. I'm not too sure if I set it to where it would read the CD first because the ECS board is forcing itself to just read the A drive first. But reading from CD first is usually by default. I might have to take a look at that. I remember doing that on my first TUL motherboard, but I'm not sure if I did it on this one.

I kinda wish I could load up my TUL motherboard than the ECS. TUL has more features than the one I just put in and way cheaper.

kinda wish that this would all go away. I never thought it would be this complicated

 

[dgorner]

did you load your hard drive with the diskette? or cd that came with it so that you have a boot sector? and usually by default mobo should be set to boot from a: first. see if you can load your hard drive and partion it how you want, so you have a boot sector, you did say it was a new install, no os right? then you should be able to load windows. but just make sure in bios that its booting from either the diskette or cd what ever your hard drive is, so you dont get a invaklid disk error

 

[keithster]

My hard drive came with a CD. But, when my computer loaded it up as a secondary hard drive, it automatically reconized it. I'm not to sure if that mattered or not.

To clarify again, there is absolutly nothing on the hard drive. There's no OS, drivers or anything. According to what you're saying, I should put my hard drive CD so that it could reconize a boot sector to load in a OS. First I'm going to take a look at my bios and get it to load up on my CD first.

I wish that I have my computer in my office right now so that I can fix it while I'm not doing much in my little cube.

 

[dgorner]

yeah if i was there i know i would have it up in a minute, once i got to bios. why is it reading your hd as secondary it is the only hard drive in your comp right? if it is, in your bios did you have bios detect your hard drive?, if so it should be reading as your primary.

 

[keithster]

To be honest, it is set on primary. I did set it to master and the bois read it as primary too. So I don't think it's too much of the HD fault.

I'm totally going to blow my latest motherboard because I have a bad inpression on it the moment I opened it. I'm going to return them both. I'm going to try with this MSI motherboard I see on Newegg.com. They not top notch quality brand name, but it has the same good features as my TUL version. Plus it has a VGA input so that I can work on my board step-by-step if I have to when it comes to inserting my video card. I'm starting to think that this the card is the problem because I'm not setting it up correctly.
Plus with a VGA onboard connector I get to have duel monitors with my ATI graphics!
But I don't like the motherboard I in there now. I'll switch it out.

And just think.........I took online classes