problems installing XP

[Pirate1650]

I just finnished building my first computer, the first screen was a blue dos looking one, I formatted my hard drive and it copied some setup files to the drive it gave a countdown and restarted which was all well and good, then nothing. Now i just get a blinking underscore.

From what I understand it is supposed to boot from the hard drive and bring up a nice looking screen that shows me through the rest of the install, but if I set the CD to boot and wait past the "press to boot from cd" i get nothing and if I set hard drive to boot then I just get the blinking underscore.

I found a similar post on here saying the RAM was in the wrong place

My only other guess is that the hard drive is not responding / working

The computer is:

AMD Semperon 1.6 Ghz
Gigabyte GA-K8VM800M
Kingston 512MB ram (one stick)
Lite-on CD/RW drive
Western Digital IED 80GB hard drive

Any suggestions are appreciated

-Bill

[Cricket]

How is the IDE drive jumpered? And are you using a 80 wire IDE cable?

If it's an 80 wire IDE cable you should set the drive jumper to CS and connect the hard drive to the black end connector. Blue connector goes to the motherboard.

:) Cricket

[Pirate1650]

I used the one that came with the motherboard, it has a black, gray and green end in that order. I have the black on the hard drive, and the green to a green slot on the motherboard the first IDE slot (the gray is for a slave drive? its unattached) The CD/RW is hooked up to the second IDE as per the instruction manual.

I just reformatted (again) and now all it does is get past the opening page with the "press delete to enter BIOS" and then finnishes the second page, beeps and restarts.

I also moved the RAM and so far no noticable difference.

-Bill

[Pirate1650]

also hard drive jumper is on CS

-Bill

[Cricket]

Is the CD-RW jumpered properly for the type of IDE cable you're using? If it's a 40 wire IDE cable the jumper should be set to master. If it's a 80 wire IDE cable the jumper should be set to CS.

:) Cricket

[Pirate1650]

the instructions said for best performance set to master but i can change it to CS in a jiff, I dont think its the CD thats the problem though since that has been working fine all along. I'm going to keep plugging away at it for another hour then im calling it quits for the day. Thanks for the help so far.

-Bill

[Cricket]

You might want to test the hard drive with the manufacturer's diagnostic utility. Go to the Western Digital web site and check the support section > downloads for the Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for DOS (Floppy) and test your WD HDD with it.

:) Cricket

[Pirate1650]

i deleted the partition and reformatted it, so far so good. It is on to the next screen finally and windows is installing, I guess it was the RAM since i moved it out of desperation. It wasnt listed in the motherboard's manual. Thanks for the help Cricket. I'm sure to have more builds soon since my friends all said if i could build this cheap one, they want me to make thiers.

-An appreciative Bill