Hello, I am currently putting a system together, P4 prescott 3.0 ghz, 512MB Kingston pc3200 Ram, 80 gb serial ata drive with an ECS 865PE-A motherboard.

When I first booted the machine it wasnt recognizing the serial HD, so I rebooted and went into the BIOS to enable the SATA connection.

Rebooted the machine and then it froze at the point "verifying dmi pool data...".

Rebooted and then received no POST, no beeps, nothing on the monitor, I turned off the computer, reset the cmos, turned it on, received a POST, went back in to the BIOS and all of a sudden the bios freezes.

Now no POST again. (Fans run, LED's on). What in the devil is going on here? I am at a complete loss. Thanks for your time.

you might have a loose connection to the hd or other part of your system that is interfering with you booting one time there was so much dust inside my case that it messed up while i was booting. i dont know how you fix the bios thing.

I'm really stuggling here.

Tried another stick of memory to rule that out. Still same problems.

Took the 400W power supply out of my old system, used it in the new one, still same problem. Is it possible that my power supplies are just too weak?

One that came with the system is a 350W. Same probs with a 400W.

Last I got out of the machine was it booted off the CD into Windows setup, but then proceeded to freeze where it stated "Setup is starting Windows..."

Now no POST AGAIN!

AHH!

It's not your PSU being "too weak"..

It sounds like your board is shorting out on something or is just bad.

I would take the whole thing out of the case, put it together with the minimum needed to test: The motherboard, a video card, a keyboard, and a CD ROM drive. Build it on a piece of cardboard or something else non-conductive, like a wooden desktop.

Go to www.memtest.org - download the bootable CD ISO and burn it to a disk. If you can't, then do the floppy one instead.

After you have the barebones built outside of the case, boot off the memtest floppy/CD and run memtest for one full pass. If you make it through all 7 tests with zero errors, then try mounting the whole mess back in the case, being very careful to make sure there are no standoffs where there aren't screw holes in the motherboard, or any other piece of metal touching metal at the bottom of the motherboard. After you have it back together, run memtest again.

Let us know how that part goes, and then we'll go from there.