MSI 975x Platinum PowerUp Booting issues

Reseat the Processor and Ram. Sometimes motherboards get shipped with dead batteries.

i've tried many times now reseating the processor and ram and still nothing. I even went out and bought a cheap celeron to try which still gave me nothing. I am now resigned to the fact that i will have to buy a new board and return the old one  

Did you try replacing the battery?
Take the motherboard out of the case and put it on a piece of cardboard.
Start it with just the processor. Look for beeps.
Then add memory. Look for beeps. Then add graphics card, etc., always looking for beeps.
If you have no beeps then the motherboard is probably dead.

Are you sure that all power connectors are plugged into the motherboard?
More precisely the extra 4 pins connector for powering the CPU..

my 975X wouldnt work properly without using the full 8pin connector. The 4 pin doesnt do it, neither will a 6.Got to be the 8...

thats MSI for you - absolute rubbish

before Mr helpfull jumps in with MSI sucks....I run Asus myself this build is for a client.

The issue I am having is that the bios recognises the two 250 gig ata drives on IDE1...but will not recognise the DVD burners,or any of the 4 test cd/dvd burners that I have tried on IDE2.
The MSI manual that came with the MOBO is useless....the entire description of the bios is as follows"load optimal defaults and boot system to load OS"
The PDF manuall online suggests that IDE2 supports only a single drive...????...although this does not seem the case with a rom device or Burner,CD or DVD.
I feel that either I have a defunct second IDE channel,or I need to set something in the bios (which I can get to no prob) to make the second IDE bus work for the DVD burners.

Any suggestions from anyone that has set up such a board would be appreciated.I have been A+ certified for over ten years...but this has me banging my head....

The 975X chipset only has 1 built in IDE channel. The second IDE channel is controlled by the JMircron controller chip. This is the reason why the BIOS will not see any drives connected to the IDE2 channel. The BIOS only recognizes devices that the 975X chipset controls.

Any drives connected to the JMicron controller chip will be recognized after the BIOS has loaded and before Windows begins to load.

If you have not done so already, install the JMicron drivers from the CD that came with your motherboard. Otherwise your drives may be running in PIO mode instead of DMA mode.

After a visit to the MSI forums...I have now put a single 250 Pata drive on IDE1 as master,and a dvd burner on IDE1 as slave...
So far so good ...bios recognised both drive and rom,and proceeded to load the windows startup files.However when it gets to the format of the drive...I have a huge issue.
I started formatting the drive at 9am this morning and now at 4pm...it is only at %11.
Obviouslty the drive is running insanely slow...
I have a feeling that it is a bios issue...but no idea what it may be.
I usually build AMD boards and this whole JMicron...odd second IDE port etc are just a different language.
Any help would be appreciated...

That's kinda odd. Are both drives set to "Auto" mode in the BIOS or PIO mode? In any case, you should be able to connect your DVD drives to the IDE2 port while leaving your hard drives on the IDE1 port. Then do the installation. You should have any problems with the Windows installation.

Don't worry about the DVD drives not being detected in the BIOS, as I stated before the JMicron controller will recognize the drives after the BIOS has loaded. Just make sure that in the BIOS you set the PC to boot from the CD drive and everything should work smoothly.

I ended up going back into bios and turning off that Jmicron chip and that has set the drives working at normal speed.
Of course after further reading I also realise that I have to reinstall so that i can load the JMicron driver from floppy at F6....
So that is what i am in the process of doing now.
Hopefully once XP loads now,I can go into bios...turn JMicron back on...and install the DVD drives on IDE2...and yes both were running in DMA not PIO mode.
Thanks for your help bud.I am hoping that the Jmicron didnt have to be on for the floppy driver to work......I am hating intel builds....

I got the same exact problem: same board, got 2x250gb SATA in raid + 1x500gb ide+1x250gb ide on IDE0 (aka ide1) + dvd-burner (alone) on IDE1 (aka ide2). Everything works the way it is said here, both IDE drives are in DMA, and of course the burner is in PIO (and I want to change it!).

I installed the JMicron drivers, Vista recognizes everything great. BIOS doesn't see the burner, yet the JMicron drivers detects it. BIOS is set to boot on burner... I get into Vista, it's stuck on PIO (DMA option is greyed out).

Sigh...