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Lots of probs building new system with my 10 year old..

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Hoping to access all the great brainpower out there to help!!

My husband and I (not hardware guru’s though he’s an engineer and I work in high tech are helping budding 10 year old son techie build his first PC. We bought a tower, a Gigabyte-GA-880-GM-D2H motherboard, a CPU, and RAM. We installed these pretty easily using PC for dummy’s book. We added a Western Digital WD800 Ide drive and DVD reader using a master slave relationship on the Ide as the mother board only could accommodate one.

The drive had a previously installed version of Windows Xp on it. We are happy to reformat and install windows 7 which we also bought. Here’s what happens on boot

We get “Windows did not start correctly” with 5 options:

safe mode, safe mode with networking, safe mode with command prompt, last usable version of windows or start windows normally. We have tried all 5 options and it just loops back to the same screen.

Then I went into bios and made the DVD drive my first boot drive, with the hard drive as second boot drive, then we get to a screen with a number of instructions followed by :

Amd data change....update new data to dmi
Boot from CD/DVD:

Which just sits there unable to accept a y or n- but eventually loops back to the same screen.

Additional data- I believe we are using cable select rather than jumpering to designate master slave as we have not set any switches on the hard drive or motherboard that would change it. When we boot it shows both drives on channel 0 as master (HD) and slave (DVD).

I also have not flashed the bios as my understanding was that it was risky. When I go into BIOS it gives me a choice to do a Qflash, but I am worried-and the motherboard instructions tell us to go and download the latest version to a USB drive which I do not think we can get to anyway at this point.

Ollie is so frustrated – I want to get this working for him very badly- any and all suggestions are appreciated- including upgrading to a SATA hard drive. Though we feel like we would like to salvage something for the system he is supposedly “upgrading” that's what this exersice was all about ;) 

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Here's some ideas, not sure exactly though... Go into the BIOS and load default settings, then set the dvd drive to first boot device and disable secondary, etc, boot devices. You'll need to have a Windows disc to reformat it though. First though, make sure you've disconnected all peripherals except a keyboard and also that there aren't any add on cards inside the case (e.g. PCI wireless cards etc.

Are both the HDD and DVD IDE? And you have 1 IDE connector on the motherboard? I guess you are using a 2 drive connector ribbon cable to connect both? Set jumpers to HDD master and try that. Normally you don't need to change the jumper for slave on the DVD but you might try that as well.
Try BIOS again and boot fromm DVD.
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1 Ribbon cable, 2 drives goes like this. Hard drive on the end of the cable set to master. CD/DVD on the center connection set to slave. If there is no notch or tab on the ribbon cable to orient it correctly (some cables dont have them!) the red stripe on the cable goes towards the number 1 pin in the slot.
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