NF7-S won't boot. HELP!!!

[vazquezjm]

Hi all, hope you can help.

My set up:

MOBO: NF7-S v2.0 (BIOS not flashed, factory default)
CPU: AMD XP2500+ Barton
MEM: 2x256MB OCZ Premiere
VGA card: Diamond Viper 330 PCI (I know, it's a dinosaur, I'll replace it soon)
HD: Maxtor 80GB ATA133
CD-ROM

Here's the situation:

The system works apparently OK, all fan are spinning, memory check is OK, CPU is detected as well as the CD drive. I'm using the included SATA adapter for EIDE on SATA1.

When I try to boot with a CD (Win XP) the process stops after checking for SATA drives (Maxtor HD is detected). If I disable SATA controller, a cursor blinks on the upper left corner of the screen and the CD drives looks like reading the WinXP (or whatever OS I put in there) but nothing on the screen, just the blinking cursor. After 30 seconds or so, the CD stops spinning and nothing else happens.

I also tried with no HD connected. The CD drive plugged into both IDE0 and IDE1 slots, with 40 and 80 pin IDE cable...

Tried a boot floppy disk, the same...

Removed the BIOS battery to clean BIOS, loaded with fail safe values, the same happened....

What could be wrong?

Please help!!

 

[pat]

Maybe the serial interface is set for RAID and you are not using it this way. Maybe there is a jumper or in BIOS to select either serial ATA or serial ATA RAID. My soltek mobo has one ans it come set as RAID at default. If i wanted to use it as standard controller, I'll have to set it to disable the RAID.

-Always put the blame on you first, then on the hardware !!!

 

[vazquezjm]

I tried without any HD or CD drives connected and SATA disabled (from BIOS), just the floppy with Win98SE bootdisk with no luck.

I'm starting to think that the mobo is bad... I'll take it to where I bought it on Monday.

Thanks anyway!

 

[vazquezjm]

Problem solved. It was the PCI Video Card, tried with an AGP 4x card and worked perfectly well.

Thanks.

 

[Crashman]

That problem (works with AGP but not PCI) would normally be caused by the PCI card having an IRQ conflict with another device, probably your RAID controller. You could have moved the PCI card to a different slot.

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