Adventures in my first computer

[CorneliusBrutus]

This has certainly been an interesting couple of days.

Sapphire radeon 1800XT
Asus A8N-SLI MB
Corsair ValueSelect RAM 2x1 gig
ASUS 1608p2s DVD writer
etc etc I dunno if it's all relevant

So yesterday, I put everything together. Works fine, gets to BIOS, everyone is happy. At BIOS I realize I forgot to add power to my Seagate SATAII drive, silly me. I plug it in and have the Windows XP OEM cd in the drive, ready to install, and boot it back up. How odd, it doesn't recognize the system disk. I go back to the BIOS and see that my primary IDE Master ASUS drive is no longer recognized.

I look online for solutions for about an hour, try all sorts of things. Then on one boot, suddenly I can't even get a DISPLAY or get to BIOS at ALL. The Board makes 1 long beep, 2 short beeps, everything is running, LED's lit up, fans spinning.

I look it up on the internet again, to find it's apparently a video or memory error. I troubleshoot some more and I'm at wits end, can anyone here help me?

[CorneliusBrutus]

Okay, stop everything. I cleared CMOS and replugged my RAM, one of those got me back up to BIOS, I think I probably messed something up in the BIOS.

It still won't recognize both of my drives at once, any suggestions?

[glc]

Put the DVD drive on the secondary IDE, not the primary.

[CorneliusBrutus]

I think I may have tried that already, but I'll give it another try.