New build....I've got a problem!

[whasup1546]

Hi everyone!

Frequent reader first time poster here.

I've just put together my new rig and I don't even get a screen up. Everything lights up motherboard, graphics card etc

The equipment:

Motherboard: Asus Maximus II Formula
Gfx Card: Zotac 8800 gt Amp
Processor: q6600
Case: Antec 900
HDDs: 2 500gig Samsung Spinpoints
Optical: Samsung DVDR
PSU: Be quiet 650w modular PSU

The 3 drives are hooked up via SATA cables, power is going to everything as far as I can see. 24 pin in the motherboard etc. 1 thing that did stump me was that the mobo had 2 ATX power connectors, EATX12V an 8 pin and the EATXPWR which is the usual 24 pin.

There isn't a speaker for the beeps when it posts which is a pain, but there is an LCD poster attached to the mobo which is meant to tell you of any issues that come up. But it always says 'welcome' when I turn it on!

The monitor remains black with no signal as far as I can see, the 8800gt has been taken out of my old pc, as I was using it to give it a bit of a boost before I built a new one, so I know it works.

Any directions to point me in?

Thanks in advance!!

 

[jedi940]

your board will have two power connectors. The 24 pin is the main connector and the 8 pin is for the cpu power. If you have nothing plugged into that then your cpu is not getting power which is why you have no display.

 

[whasup1546]

Thanks I noticed I'd left a cable out earlier lol

Earlier on today I finally finished building my new rig, and after trying to use the overclocking software on my Asus Maximus II Formula I've hit a few snags :/

Firstly it told me I needed to restart, so I let it. Then it didn't reboot.

Then it told me that the overclocking procedure had failed on the bios as it booted, and I could load with standard settings which I thought great I'll do that.

Now everytime I reboot it says operating system is missing!! One thing that had been bothering me was just how often the HDD seemed to be accessing itself, about 90% of the time so it was far from quiet.

I'm currently waiting on Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool as I type this up on my laptop.

Any ideas? I've got this horrid feeling it might well be one of my new Samsung Spinpoint HDDs :/

If so I've lost a large chunk of data I moved across, stupidly moving it instead of copying it as I wanted to free up some space on my USB HDD.

I can also add some further info to this now.

I have tried to boot again using the Vista Disc, and get this error.

0xc000000e9

Info: An unexpected I/O error has occurred.

Which from what I can gather on google isn't a good sign.

Any ideas?


The rig as mentioned earlier.

Motherboard: Asus Maximus II Formula
Gfx Card: Zotac 8800 gt Amp
Processor: q6600
Case: Antec 900
HDDs: 2 500gig Samsung Spinpoints
Optical: Samsung DVDR
PSU: Be quiet 650w modular PSU

 

[jedi940]

I hate having problems with new hardware. Always gives me a bad feeling.

Anyways, can you get into the bios now? If so, have you tried to load the defaults/failsafe settings aside from the option it gave you while booting? If not try that.

Is the BIOS recognizing both of your drives? If so, perhaps you could try installing your operating system on the other drive to make sure the system works. Then maybe you will be able to access the info you already copied to the other drive without having to loose it.

Also, make sure the boot order is correct and it's not looking for an OS on a floppy drive or something.

Try this software for diagnostic. The two biggest helps on this are memtest86 and various hard drive diagnostics. The CD can be downloaded from the site for free and is bootable.
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

 

[whasup1546]

It's also the first PC I've built since the early pentium days :/ It was all going so well, though the noise of the HDDs was causing me some concern. I figured it was all because I was updating alot of things, copying etc But it never seemed to get quiet, all I could hear was the sound of heavy heavy writing.

The BIOS is accessible, and I have reverted to the fail safe/backup bios (bios number 2) still no luck getting past the 'Missing operating system' message.

I double checked the boot order and it still is the same as when it was working but I will go in and adjust it to boot from HDD only and take out USB and CD/DVD options.

The drives are set up in Raid 0, think I'm going to have to set them up as separate drives and attempt to find the faulty one. Thanks for the link to the boot disc I'm going to run the Samsung parts once it's downloaded.

I hadn't even thought of checking the memory, so thanks for that art too.

Right off I go to run al the diagnostics.

 

[whasup1546]

Well I inserted Ultimate Boot CD.....

And I quote:

Press [Enter] to Boot the Ultimate Boot CD...

Boot:
Booting...
Missing operating system

 

[whasup1546]

And I'm into Windows, my BIOS had reset itself to think that my HDDs were IDE instead of RAID. But both Bios' had which is what is confusing.

My HDD is still making a racket though so once everything is backed up I will set about scanning them for errors etc. Then un-install them and try them 1 at a time to see if I can narrow down the issues. Thanks for all the help!

 

[jedi940]

glad you figured it out. I didn't realize your drives were in raid 0. I have my computer set up that way too and I had similar issues at first. It took me a while to figure it out too. At least there is nothing wrong with your hardware.

 

[shortstuff_mt]

Vista indexes your hard drive on a fresh install which causes a lot of read/write activity for a little while. Give it some time and you should notice the excess HD activity diminish once Vista gets the initial index done.

 

[whasup1546]

Yeah everything seems to be fine, though I cannot use HUTIL Samsungs HDD scanning software which is a tad worrying. It finds the Raid config and both drives then doesn't name either for me to select for scanning.

I had forgotten about Vista indexing everything, I've only been using it for about a month. I will give it some time to work everything over and put it through a few stress tests to see how it handles things. It's currently running chkdsk /r and the HDDs are amazingly silent. Infact the whole rig is quieter than my laptop lol.

Here's hoping that the excessive noise is just Vista!

Thanks for the help guys.