Can someone help with this?

[papichulo1968]

I have a good friend of mine that bought some hardware and have some trouble, i told him I would put his email to me here and see if you guys could lend a hand , so here goes:
ya I'll give you a quick rundown of what I have and what problems the
damn things givin me. I bought a motherboard, cpu, some ram, and 2 video
cards and a power supply. The motherboard is an ECS PA1 MVP (2.0)
(www.ecsusa.com) the cpu is a Pentium D 820 and,OCZ DDR2-667 PC5400 ram,
and 2 sapphire 128mb x1600pro's the pci-express versions and a 550 watt
ps. I put it all together, I know how to put everything together real
easy, but its wont really boot up. I can get into the bios sometimes if
it decides to let me, I'd change the settings so that both pci-express
slots are supposed to be on and ready for crossfire mode. I set up alot
of the settings in bios and saved and when it should have been booting
up it stopped and gave me an error that said NTLDR failed. So I tried
to format and put another version of windows on my first hard drive, but
it wouldnt even boot the cd. then because I couldnt really do anything
I had to shut down, when I restarted it wouldnt even show the screen
even with both pci-e slots supposed to be on. so I cleared the bios with
the jumper thats on the motherboard, and after a few times of
restarting it finally let me see it boot up again. then it said I only had just
the cd rom plugged in, and I have a cdrom,dvdrom, and 2 hard
drives....I dont know this things really started to piss me off lol, I had the
hard drives working on my old computer setup but now it doesnt even see
them... im baffled and really annoyed cause I want to play half life 2
on max settings and this new game fear that newegg.com sent me with part
of one of my orders. I'm thinking maybe..maybe my hard drives are
dead... but I hope not cause I have a 40 gig which I could care less about
formatting but my 160gig has alot of stuff on it that I need, programs
and ****** that are hard to find...but ya check out the websites for my
stuff and see if im just retarted and missed something, ill list them
below... I dont know tell me what you think.

www.ecsusa.com
www.ati.com/crossfire
www.sapphiretech.com

- Thanks.

 

[robertk2012]

Tell him to take out one of those video cards and hook up the bare minimum of drives and see what happens.

Also make sure the jumpers are set correctly on the drives.

Yeah single stick of ram.

 

[stevty2889]

He isn't trying to take a hard drive from another computer, with windows already installed, and trying to get it to work with the new hardware is he? 9 times out of 10, if you switch motherboards, and try and keep the same windows install, it's not going to work. If thats the case, a repair install should work.

He also needs to try with a single video card, and single stick of ram, to eliminate those as the problem.

Also, what is the exact model of his power supply, 550w is meaningless if it's a generic power supply.

Oh and it would be helpful if you could split that in paragraphs or something, I was very tempted to just not read that at all.

 

[snoturtle]

Hiyas

I have almost an identical setup except I am running a single x850xt

Has he tried with with just one video card and what slots are the memory in?
Does he have all 3 power plugs plugged into the motherboard?

 

[Armorize]

Hi, that would be me hes talking about. I've tried all of those things, the motherboard doesnt always post like it should, to work with jjust video card i have to plug it into the second slot and put the shunt card in the first slot (it doesnt work the other way around). My understanding of the 1600 and 1300 series are that they all have the compositing engine that crossfire edition cards have.

If I can get it to post and get into bios I check to see if its seeing all my devices, for some stupid reason or another it only sees my cdrom drive. I set the cdrom to boot first and tried to reformat but got an error saying, system disk failed to boot reinsert system disk and press enter, and it goes nowhere. So I decided to try one of my live-Linux cds that I had lying around just to see if I could get somewhere with it with the same error.

another weird thing is that the boot image that says PA1 MVP EXTREME is in 8-bit color. I went to a local computer store to see if someone could help me out there...nada, the answer I got from them was that the motherboard is possibly just bad....anybody wana buy a motherboard? lol...but seriously...help...

the power supply is a Rosewill RP550

 

[snoturtle]

Have you tried with just one stick of memory?
How are the drives setup?
same cable? master/slave?

Have you tried with 1 memory 1 hd and 1 video card?

 

[Armorize]

ya i was just doing that. I checked all of my things and set masters and slaves to just that, i have a WD and a Maxtor, I just plugged in 1 cd rom and set it to master in IDE0 and the WD (smaller 40 gig easier to format) in IDE1 and set the boot priorities so the cd would boot first and hd second, but I still got the same error, I tried using the dvd instead of the cdrom, but i got the same error I did before, system disk failed to boot reinsert system disk and press enter ... I'm tired and need to work tommorow but I feel kinda dumb that I never checked that and the "tech support" guys I visited didnt even check that out.

also about the weird 8bit look, I checked ATi's website and searched their knowledgebase and their was alot of complaints about this weird error happening...

at least im closer to figurin out whats wrong and i know that its not my motherboard thats given me the problems, its posting a bit more consistently now, dont really know why... still kinda skeptical...idk... something with the cdrom now or something..idk.. its something stupidly obvious im missing i know it...

but thanks snoturtle lol. any other help would be nice =)

 

[snoturtle]

The only other thing I can think of is to try without any drives at all and see what happens

If it boots ok you than know its either a drive or a bad cable

Yours probably came with the litte bios replacement thing you may want to try that aswell

Good luck

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi, Strip it down to MB, PSU, One stick of RAM and VIDEO. If it tries to boot add KB. If it gets you to BIOS SETUP reliably start adding devices one at the time. When you again have the problem the last device you added is the bad guy. Good Luck, Jim

 

[Armorize]

lol, thanks, well surprisingly for as many people telling me that ecs boards suck, their customer service isnt bad. They reply pretty damn quick. I was working on it last night and it was posting consistantly, I was trying to install windows it finally let me do it and then i was almost finished installing and it restarted for no reason... it went through the motions one more time and started the windows installation again and then froze partway though. I turned the power off and let it sit awhile and tried again and it wouldnt post again, I was up all night trying to get it to work but not once did it post after that...

ecs emailed me and told me to flash the bios supposedly (I havent checked yet) they have a new bios revision... but how am I going to flash the bios if the bios wont even post lol...oh silly taiwanese mobo makers...