New build won't boot

[rconant1]

New Athlon XP retail 1800+, OEM Heatsink
256mb Crucial 2100DDR
ASUS A7M266 rev. 1.04 with 1.4 Bios (USED)
Antec PP-303X 300W PS
ATI All-in-Wonder Rage 128
Maxtor 40GB HD

Installed CPU in board and attatched heatsink, plugged in to CPU_PWR connector. Installed RAM. Set Jumpers to CPU Auto, all other default. Installed board into case. Connected power supply cable, floppy, HD to channel 1, installed video card in AGP slot, AGP pro slot had spacer missing. Booted system, Bios did recognize CPU correctly, RAM correctly, HD, floppy, POSTed fine. While scanning PCI bus, it finds IDE controller, serial bus controller, display controller, then freezes with a flashing cursor.???? Any ideas? Can't Flash the Bios to Version 1.6, latest available. Don't have an extra Athlon CPU to verify, or extra board totry mem or CPU on. Frustrated. Any help would be appreciated. Tried moving ram to other slot, different video card, temp of CPU in bios is good, voltages look good...... frustrated

[Cricket]

Hi rconant1,

Are you sure that used motherboard is working properly?

Do you have any card in any of the PCI slots right now? If you do, try removing them.

Do you have a optical drive connected? Try disconnecting it. I've seen some bad CD-ROM drives halt a system while it's booting up. Floppy drives too.

Cricket

[rconant1]

Thanks, had all drives disconnected, then added floppy, optical, made no difference, no pci slots filled. Good news, got ahold of a Duron 700, booted, flashed bios to 1006. Now system boots, but my old XP setup didn't like the new mobo, going with a clean install, halted twice saying that there was a memory error, my crucial pc2700, worked fine on a like mobo with 1.2 athalon clocked at 144mhz fsb. will try again.