WmAx said:
Purchased IS7 MOBO. Installed 80GB drive on IDE1 and DVD-R drive on IDE2. Installed two 256mb PC3200 chips, on DIMM 1 and DIMM3, for a total of 512mb. Installed PNY GeForce 6200 video card. CPU is P4 2.8Ghz FSB800Mhz.
HD and CD-R
------------
How is the hard drive and cd-r jumpered? If you put the hard drive by itself on ide 1 with no slave drive, it should be jumpered Master (usually the default setting). Likewise, the CD-R should be the single Master on IDE2 if you have no other drives. You can use CSEL (cable select) but it requires that you use the first connector if you want it to be master and the second connector if you want it to be slave. It's better to jumper them explicitly.
If you inadvertantly set the hd as slave with no master alone on one ide channel and do the same thing for ide channel 2, it can take it awhile to enumerate the devices on the ide channel.
If the board also supports sata, there should be additional settings to define whether it boots from ide channel 1 or sata channel 1. Make sure the sata options are all disabled if you are only using ide drives.
Memory
--------
Is it a dual channel motherboard? If so, there are restrictions for the size and arrangement of the memory chips and the restrictions should be listed in the manual. Some motherboards will not support double sided dimms in dual channel configuration. I don't know the layout of that board but slot 1 and slot 3 doesn't sound right. For dual channel, they ideally should be identical and most likely place in adjacent slots. Also make sure they are seated properly. If they are not you will usually get two beeps at startup. If the bios has a setting for 'halt on error' and you have it set to 'all except keyboard' or anything other than 'all' it will continue to post even if the memory test fails.
Graphics
--------
Try removing the card and installing it after the system is setup. The default ms vga drivers may not be able to initialize the card properly.
CPU
----
Abit boards have loads of options for overclocking. If the cpu core voltage is too high or the fsb speed is incorrect, things may only work sporadically. There should be a 'load fail safe defaults' type setting in the bios that will set everything to minimum timings.
WmAx said:
Standard checks are ok upon bootup. I don't know how long this should take on the IS7, but it is maybe 2-3 minutes before board starts to attempt to boot from DVD-R or HD.
The boot order is set in the bios. It will usually default to 'removable discs (floppy), hd 1, cd, network. You can always change it so that cd is first so you can boot from the cd. You said the floppy was disabled, but there may be an additional setting called something like 'bootup floppy seek'. If that is set to true and the floppy is disabled, it will take a while while it tries the non-existent floppy. When everything is configured correctly, it should take seconds for it to start the boot process from the cd.
WmAx said:
When I try to boot from DVD-R drive with Windows XP Setup disc, it takes about 3 minutes to get to the screen that says checking hardware. Screen goes blank. About 5 minutes later the blue setup screen comes up. When I select Setup Windows, it says that no HD is detected. The HD serial/id number shows up in BIOS, however.
That will happen if the drives are incorrectly jumpered or the ide connector isn't seated fully.
When I try to boot from HD[no disc in DVD-R], I get 'DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER'. If I insert, say, the Abit board disk, it goes to a black screen with a blinking cursor. Nothing happens, nothing can be typed, etc..
Is the keyboard connected via usb? If so, make sure 'Legacy USB support' is enabled; it is usually off by default. When it is off and you have a usb keyboard, you won't be able to type until the os loads and you haven't gotten that far yet. I assume the Abit board disc to which you are referring contains chipset drivers and inf files. They cannot be loaded until after the os is installed. If this is a clean install, then the boot disk failure is normal - the ntkrnl has not been loaded and won't be until you get the machine to boot from the xp setup disc.
Lots of possibilities...
