New Rig, Initial Boot Problems

[Falk]

Thanks in advance for any advice you may be able to offer... ... just built a new rig, comprised of an ABIT NF7-s mobo, AMD Athlon XP CPU, 2x 1GB PC3200 DDR RAM, etc. etc... and on my first boot attempt I'm running into a snag. I hit the power button, lights turn on, fans spin up, the monitor comes alive, I think all is well; the monitor manages to spit out a couple lines, then stops. Top of the screen displays information regarding the BIOS... Then CPU Clock speed (albeit, lower than spec significantly, but I'm assuming this is just for a safe, first boot)... Then total system memory... Then memory frequency 400hz... Then "ddr dual-channel enabled"... And at the bottom it says "Hit Del to enter Setup, Hit Alt-F2 to run AWDFLASH", followed by a blurb about nVidia. At this point it does not respond to any input. Del does nothing, Alt-F2 does nothing. I'm assuming the keyboard works, because the Numlock, Capslock, Scrolllock lights all flash once on startup as normal. Keyboard is plugged into a PS/2 slot, not USB... so let's run with the assumption that it's not the keyboard. I've reset the CMOS, exact same result upon startup. If I hit Alt-F2 repeatedly from startup, the message on the bottom of the screen changes to "Loading AWDFLASH.exe from floppy, please wait" but the floppy drive does not spin, and does not light up. Come to think of it, the floppy light doesn't even flash on startup. Should it? As for the AWDFLASH.exe, I found updated BIOS files for my Mobo and put them on a disk formatted for booting, but w/o the 3.5 drive reading the disk it'll never find the file, and will continue to be stuck there. Any advice?

[Tebow2000]

when installing, make sure you didn't bend on of the pins on the cpu, and make sure it is securly fastend into the base. also, check the ram and make sure both are fastend securely into their slots, as well as the harddrives

[richh0323]

I would also remove one stick of ram for now, dissconnect anything that you don't need to boot, drives cards, and see if you get thru the boot process. If you do stat putting back in the drives, ect one at a time and repeat boot process. PS don't flash the BIOS yet, wait till you get it working, it may muck it up if you do