Fubared

[Oldschool Alpha]

I am currently bringing and old custom built computer of mine back to life and so far I have hit several walls. First one is my new 160 GB SATA hard drive that my computer wont recognize, i have already brought it to a local computer repair shop and had a friend there check it for me, he formatted it for me and said it was working just fine. My computer will read another SATA drive with no problem. My second problem is from another older hard drive that i put in and tryed to install windows xp on. The installation gets about 50 % of the way through and then turns itself off and starts beeping (even after I have unplugged the power completely from the back of it. I am ready to pull my hair out, can anyone please help?

[nevermind1534]

It looks like you might have a problem with your motherboard. It fits your description of your problems almost perfectly. Can you try another one?

[ShockTheBox]

sounds like the mobo is the suck.. maybe try some different ram.. or do a quicktec pro scan or pc check .. boot from a cd and do some system checks

[NightrainSrt4]

Could be ram, could be mobo. Hard to tell with that info.

If you give us the model number of the motherboard, and the specific pattern of beeps it is giving, we might be able to diagnose an issue.

+1 for grabbing a CD with Memtest and such on it.

[Oldschool Alpha]

Unfortunatly I dont have another mobo to test it out. I have gotten a hard drive running a OS called Kubunto to load up and work with no problem. I original 1g Ballistix RAM ended up being bad, replaced it with a temp 512. I took it apart and cleaned everything today and put it back together, but it still wont read my hard drive at being there.

And for my mobo # its a ABIT KV7-V

Also what would be the programs that i would need to diagnose/debugg that would boot from CD without windows being on the hard drive?

[NightrainSrt4]

Well, I was mostly going with Memtest, as that will test the memory.

If you can find a way to dl and burn http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ that would give you several diagnostic utilities, several that test hard drives as well.

Edit: Checked on Abit's website, and they have a page that links to the manual for the KV7-V but none of the links are current and either 404, or no file exists errors. This would have been helpful for the beep codes.

[HackSore]

yeah, get yourself a bootable diagnostics disc and run some checks on the motherboard, i would recommend eurosoft pc check, its pretty thorough.

[Drum Thumper]

Do you have a 3.5" floppy hooked up? If not, hook one up and enable the 3.5" in the BIOS (if you happen to have it disabled). I had similar problems with a Socket A board and they all went away once I re-enabled/reinstalled the 3.5".