Hi,
Feel free to laugh I've got thick skin. The only way you are going to help is if I'm completely thorough in my description. In my defense I thought that in no way could my problem be my motherboard, oh and I'm an idiot.
Recently it appears my old motherboard and/or HDD failed, and I took that as an opportunity to upgrade the entire system. I upgraded to:
ABIT AN8 32X nVidia nForce SL - Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 3800+
4 sticks of Kinston 512 DDR400 (2 from old system)
EVGA GeForce 7950T - Video Card (initial install ATI PCIe X1600 pro - sent back)
OCZ 700W RT power supply (initially installed with Thermal Take 480W)
Seagate Barracuda 320G Sata2 HDD
2 - Pioneer DVR-111D DVD Burner drives (initial install was old drives from old box - Maddog DVD and LITE-ON burner CD-ROM)
Old floppy drive from last box
Plugged all in including old disc drives, Set BIOS, loaded OS, brought OS up to date with updates, loaded programs, all on the old drives with no problem. worked great and I was happy. 2 days later the ATI video card fails (1 LONG beep in the POST, followed by 2 short). I reseat it, try the other PCIe slot, nothing. I heard the OS loading once. I assume (wrongly for the first time) that because this video card does NOT have a PCIe power connector that it must be drawing too much power from the board itself and upgrade the power supply. New power supply does nothing, so I assume it's a bad video card and send it back. I get the new video card, plug it in and every thing works fine. Problem solved, it's the card right?
Here's where it gets interesting, I mistakenly install an old version of ROXIO easy CD creator, the kind not supported by XP. After several messages by windows, I uninstall Roxio and install NERO. After the uninstall of ROXIO, all of a sudden my computer no longer shows that I have any disc drives and hardware manager has yellow exclaimations next to them. I attempt to update drivers and windows says I can't because "there is no driver better than the one already installed and the driver is either corrupt or missing" or something like that. I attempt to remove the drives and reinstall them, both automatically and manually. Same message. I assume it's the drives (wrongly for the second time), get two new drives, plug them in, same thing. In the meantime, my scanner decides to no longer work, and neither does my floppy drive. By the way, I did try to restore windows to an earlier time and I kept getting a message that it wouldn't help because I had removed the drives and reinstalled them.
Now I'm thinking I need to flash the BIOS. This board has a utility called aGURU. I brought up the utility and was trying to get to the Flash Utilily, when I found that the Flash Utiliy was not in the setting menu, but before closing I checked the "minimize after start-up" box, applied, hit Okay, and closed. Immediately my machine stats making all these noises and I'm getting a warning that the voltage to my CPU is unsafe (indicated 1.45V). Windows shuts down. I try to boot again and it gets past BIOS, loads windows (all the time with the alarm going off - sounds like an English Police Car Siren), and after about 30 seconds it shuts down again. I've tried to get back into the utility to undo what I did but windows shuts down before I can even try.
Now, Maybe this maybe the smartest thing I've done so far. I'm not going to do anything else until I get some advise about what someone with a whole lot more experience with this, has to say. Go ahead stop laughing and help me, please.
Thanks,
Albanytinman
