Ok, so my fiance and I are attempting to build me a new computer to replace my older laptop (we have both built computers before, and he used to work for a computer repair shop, so we thought we knew what we were doing). Anyway, now it keeps rebooting within <1 sec to about 60ish seconds from boot- usually it's less than 5 seconds. Here is the hardware i have:
400 W case (box)
asrock p4i65gv mobo (box)
p4 2.8 800fsb w/ 1mb cache (box)
iomagic 8x dvd +/-RW+/-R (box)
adata 512 DIMM DDR400 RAM (oem)
radeon 9700 all-in-wonder (oem)
40gb 7200 rpm hdd (oem)
HP usb floppy drive (from laptop)
We started out with just the mobo, ram, video card, and processor plugged in and attempted to boot - worked beautifully (seemingly). Tried same with floppy drive w/ win98 boot disk, again, seemingly beautiful, and booted right up to the disk. Then attempted to add hdd and dvd drive, and it started doing this rebooting thing. We've since tried taking everything off the mobo but the ram and processor, and it still does the same thing. We've reseated the ram, tried it in the other slot, checked the conections, checked the jumper settings...still no help. It does seem to stay up longer on the first boot if we have left it alone for SEVERAL hours, but it will still eventually reboot. Also, the first time we plugged in the USB drive it booted directly from that with no prompting, now it hardly even recognizes the disk as valid, if it does get that far in the boot process (but it does sometimes, so i don't think the disk is bad). We've considered updating the BIOS (there was something on intel's website about it being 'essential' that you update the bios if you have a P4 800fsb, but it didn't say why) but we fear that even if it did eventually boot to the disk, it would crash in the middle of flashing, thus making the mobo trash.
PLEASE, somebody - if you have any idea what we can do from here, let me know!!! I ordered these parts from a company across the country (Newegg.com) and only have about 3 weeks in which i can exchange them, if i figure out which one really has the problem...
I don't have any spare parts to work with, so i can't really swap out things to test that way, and I don't have the money to just buy new parts for testing purposes (except for possibly the power supply - i'm already buying this on a loan from my mom). If you have any clue what is going on, or know where we can go for help... i know Newegg doesn't do any kind of tech support, and asrock only does tech support to buyers, not to individual consumers. I'm at my wit's end here!!!
