new pc build, some first time start up problems

LukeMiller86

LukeMiller86

LukeMiller86

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Joined
1 May 2004
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144
Hi

Ive just finished building my new PC, well the mobo,cpu,ram and gfx are new, the HDD and DVD are from a previous pc.

it turns on fine and goes though to the bios screen where it says it needs a DVD to boot from. So i put one in, it restarts, goes through the verifying (i think?) loading bar screen and then goes to the "windows is starting" screen. however at the end of that screen it reboots.

the hard drives were in my previous PC and have not been formatted yet, I thought they would be able to be formatted as part of this procedure. Is that the problem or does this point to something else? Ive tried with both my existing windows vista disc, and with the latest windows 7 RC burned to a dvd.

This is my first pc build from scratch by the way, so go easy :o
 
usually means the hard drive is dead:( happend to my mates would take ages to load windows then restart after the loading screen :D however you could try you hard drives in another PC:D
 
dont have another pc to try it with.

however theres two drives in here, both were fine before i changed over the mobo/gfx/cpu/ram ect, and the same thing happens regardless of which of them i try to boot into
 
hold on, you're not trying to boot from your old installs on your hard drives are you? you're definately booting from the dvd? i.e you've selected to boot from cd from the boot menu.
 
yeah i selected the dvd drive as the primary boot drive

it comes up with the black screen with white bar and 'windows is loading files...' message

that runs thought and it moves to the next screen where it says 'microsoft corporation; and theres a loading bar (this is on vista, with the windows 7 dvd in it has the windows 7 equivalent). and then at the end of that screen it reboots
 
not likely, however i've learnt not to write anything off without good testing. for a start your system shouldn't be requiring much power just to do this, how old is the psu? i take it temps are ok?
 
psu is about a year or so old.

temps are fine i think, showing at 43 degrees when its just sitting with the bios open. all the fans are spinning fine too.

could it be RAM or is it really just likely to be some kind of hard drive problem?
 
well i don't know then maybe it is the psu however i have no method of proving it is or isn't for you except try borrowing one from a friend. I wouldn't of thought it would have been a hard disk problem as if they were messing about it would fail when you get to the selecting disk to install on bit. If they appear in BIOS i can't see there being an issue with them. Try running memtest to rule out ram maybe? i'm running out of ideas here, sorry mate.

*edit*
ooo try it with one stick of ram see if you get anywhere, and try another stick if no luck, save doing memtest for ages i suppose, unlikely all 3 sticks will be faulty.
 
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tried each stick of ram individually and the same thing happens every time, so its either not the ram or theyre all 3 sticks busted, which seems unlikely.

i have no idea what else to try, is there any other ideas at all? no matter how dumb they may seem, this is my first time building from scratch so i could have overlooked something you'd all think was obvious.
 
nope, never used linux before

i pulled out an old windows xp sp2 disc though and tried that, it allows me to format the main hard drive and then begins to install, it gets as far as the blue screen telling me about windows xps exciting new look and goes from 39 minutes left down to installing devices and 34 minutes left then it reboots :( when it comes back it resumes at 39 minutes again and this cycle continues.

now im more confused than ever


and ya both HDs are recognized in the bios
 
i wonder, could it be graphics card?

ive not seen the windows 7 install section and i dont remeber vista, but are they likely to use the graphics card in a way that the the windows xp one doesnt until it installs the devices?
 
Your memory - are you running enough voltage to it? If it's not got enough this could lead to instability problems... please check...
 
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