Friends computer is screwed up. help us?

[McSquid]

friend of mine got a new CPU and we have had nothing but trouble ever since.
Brief history:
at first when he dropped it into his working computer it didn't work at all so he RMAed as dead.

replacement didn't work either, i discovered it was because his socket pins were a little screwed up. he bought a new motherboard in the end.

Now that brings us to the current issue. we have a Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P Mobo and a Intel core two quad Q9550 CPU, When he put it all together it wouldn't boot.

I discovered that the mobo didn't support the CPU without a bios update. so i downloaded and flashed the bios using his old CPU without a problem (up to v9)

Popped in the new CPU and it booted! we were very excited. in the nonsense of troubleshooting we had disconnected a lot of things including HDDs so we reconnected everything and rebooted it.

booted fine, but turns out we forgot to plug power to the HDD (silly us) rebooted again to bios.

once in the bios we verified that the HDD was detected, saw that it was and hit save and exit.

When the computer rebooted this time. it rebooted again, and again, and again.... before hitting post. <------------CURRENT PROBLEM.

we figured it was a short, so we removed and replaced parts one at a time, tried to run it out of the case, cleaned everything. cant get it to stop doing that.

list of things we tried:
replacing CPU
Replacing RAM
Removing everything except ram, cpu, mobo, and psu.
running it out of the case
resetting CMOS using both jumper and removing battery methods.
testing the PSU using a PSU tester my mom got me for X-mas: passed

Anyone have any ideas?

[glc]

Follow this exactly:

PROBLEMS with a NEW BUILD? Try This!!

[McSquid]

Thanks for the help once again, i tried everything on the list exactly but with no luck.

however, all is well since i got a call at work the next day from my friend saying "I dont know what i did, but it works!"