mobo problem?
 

on a brandnew pc (not mine), when i boot, i get bios/post and then i simply get a blinking " _ " at the top of the screen (rather than the standard "no operating system detected, no bootable disk etc)... any brilliant ideas?

- first boot after assembly, i hadnt plugged in a kb or mouse, but it did boot alright, telling me there was no OS installed & no bootable disk. fine, normal behavior.
- i turn it off, second boot, put the windows disk in. goes into install mode.
i forgot the kb, so i plug it in now. no response after plugging in the keyboard. ****. reboot.
- third reboot with the kb connected, does not go into install mode. just hangs after bios/post, blinking " _ " top of the screen.
- fourth reboot. same thing.
- fifth, i go into bios. i can use the kb in bios, so that's not the prob.
- sixth reboot, no response after bios/post, just " _ "
- i think, **** it, and disconnect everything & clear CMOS. that'll teach 'em.
plug everything back in, configure the BIOS date/time/etc and reboot, same problem. just a blinking underscore.
- repeat blinking underscore x1000 :p
- started looking around and found it might be a hdd error. so i disconnect power & sata from the hdd & when i reboot now, i get the standard windows install/boot thing, only of course he doesnt find the hdd (since it's not connected).

any ideas (except a somehow borked HDD or a potentially fubared mobo)?

update: burned a bootable SeaTools CD from Seagate to test the hdd. same problem. wont even go into boot mode if the HDD is connect, just the blinking underscore...

update 2: plugged the Sata drive into my own computer (with and without 1.5gb/s jumper). no dice. blinking underscore of death!

I would suspect your RAM. Since this is your first build the RAM may simply not be getting enough voltage to run properly, but you should manually set all of the RAM settings yourself just to check.

so HDD screwed up? :(

Did you set the HD as boot disk? If so, add it not as boot disk.

I suspect memory too, had same problem one week ago...

yeah, ran it twice as a boot disk (unplugged all my other drives when i checked on my own pc, since i was going to check it with Seatools (boots into FreeDOS).

i'll plug it into my own pc as a slave & see what happens.
think so. i'm currently installing on a different HDD and everything is running smooth.
well, since everything is just peachy with another HDD, i doubt it's a RAM problem.
i'll check voltage when i need to reboot next time.

well now, this is strange.

when i plug it in as a slave, it just says it's an unpartitioned drive, but works just fine.

i'm starting to think that the problem was simply that there was a partial or corrupted boot section on it and that the motherboard kept hammering it, thus becoming stuck before going to the secondary boot drive (in this case the SATA DVD-RW).

currently checking the drive for errors, but coming up zilch for now... looks like it came back alive. :)

pretty annoying problem to have if you dont have a second pc to hook it up to. thanks for reminding me to try & hook it up as a slave (or i'd probably get ****ed up the *** during the RMA process).

try a low level format, that usually solves partition probs

wasnt even needed. just had to make it an active partition for the problem to go away. just did a quick partition (no need for low level format).