Problems booting

[Meghan]

I need some help. I have an ABIT AG8 motherboard, a new
power supply (Enermax 535 W, which is working, it has been tested) and 4 ATA harddrives
connected to a PCI ATA 133 IDE Card since my motherboard only has one
IDE slot (which is connected to my CD-ROM and DVD-RW drives). I also have 1 SATA harddrive. The boot drive is one of the IDE drives, they show up as PM, PS, SM, SS, so I am sure they are configured correctly. My computer is not booting (no system beep, blank screen) about 70% of the time. The other 30% it is booting and runs fine, all 5 harddrives show up and can be used. When I installed the PCI card, I did not set up a RAID set. Do I need to do this?
Do I have a bad PCI card? Something else? I'll try anything. Thanks to anyone who can
offer suggestions.

[minsonngo]

What kind of memory (brand and model) do you have installed?

Try reseating the memory. If that does not work, you can try leaving one stick in at a time.

You can also download memtest+ and run a test on your memory modules. www.memtest.org/

You can also try leaving only the bare essentials in (motherboard, processor, memory, PSU, and video card) and see if the POSTING problem goes away.

[Cricket]

Pull the motherboard from the case and see if it'll boot up 100% of the time. If it does, check the motherboard mounting tray for any standoffs that shouldn't be there and remove it.

Please post the complete system specs including the power supply. List the parts by brand and model.

Cricket

[Meghan]

Thank you for your replies. I will try both suggestions now.

Here's what I have:
Abit AG8 Motherboard
Intel P4 540 (3.2 GHz)
Enermax 535 Watt Power Supply
Corsair 512 MB DDR RAM (2 sticks)
Seagate 120 GB HD with Windows XP installed on it Master 1
Seagate 120 GB HD Slave 1
Maxtor 250 GB HD Master 2
Maxtor 60 GB HD Slave 2
Seagate 320 GB SATA HD
Archive Python Tape Drive connected to Tekram SCSI card
Plextor CD-RW Drive
Sony DVD-RW Drive

All 4 Harddrives (internal) have been connected (via IDE cable) to a Silicon Image Ultra-133 ATA IDE card because my motherboard only has SATA inputs. Since I thought maybe it was a bad card, I tried pulling the card and installing the SATA harddrive as the boot drive and leaving only that drive connected. I got the same result. The computer will boot up about 1 out of 3 times. When it finally boots up, it says the system is running in Fail-Safe mode and requires me to go into the BIOS. Even if I change nothing, and exit the BIOS, it will boot. I do not have a floppy drive, so my 1st and 2nd option for booting is Hard Disk, my 3rd option is CD-ROM.

I will try both of the above suggestions and post the results later.

[minsonngo]

Did the problem occur after you installed the IDE controller card?

See if you can move it to another PCI slot (try it in PCI Slot 2). The AGP and PCI Slot 1 share the same IRQ and so does PCI slot 4 and 5, so try to keep only one slot at time occupied if possible.

[Meghan]

Turns out it was the video card. I unplugged all the drives and it was still not booting. So when I unplugged the video card, it would boot. I replaced with a different card and it is now booting up fine. Thanks for everyone's suggestions, at least I know everything else is healthy!

[Cricket]

What brand and model was the defective video card?

Cricket

[Meghan]

It was a Radeon X300 128 Mb PCI Express card.