Machine wont start up

[lasher511]

Hi all,
This morning i started to add in a few extra parts to and older P4
E.g: DVD burner, TV capture card and sound card.

Before I started to install everything i plugged it in and everything was starting up fine so i unplugged it and started to install the parts.

After everything was installed and all the connection in properly i plugged everything back in and booted it up.

The first few times everythig appeared to be working fine until it would get up to the windows loading screen where i would just watch the little blue bars move across the screen for 15 minutes get frustrated and turn it off and try again.

On about the 3rd or 4th time i was no longer getting to the point where it would start to load windows and simply came up with an error saying

DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISC AND PRESS ENTER

Played around in the bios and changed boot sequences etc. to no luck. I have tried everthing i can think of and now i am out of ideas.

If anyone has any suggestions as to what may be causing this problem i would be most grateful

The system is:

Pentium 4 1.7ghz
512MB ram
20gb HDD
MS XP professional
and im not sure about the motherboard brand or model.

Thanks in advance,
Matt

[dcc]

Have you tried the obvious, remove what you have installed to see if the system works without the additions? If it does, add one component at a time till you find your problem. If it doesn't work, start checking for loose connections.

[lasher511]

Yes i did all that. I seem to have it working now however not quiet as well as i would like it too. The machine took a long time to boot (at least 5 minutes on the windows load screen maybe more because i went to lunch) and the overall performance i just below the standard it should be.

The problem itself seemed to be a bad IDE cable and when i tried to swap it the head snapped off completely so i assume that is what was causing the problem as it works now i have changed it.

[Ancient Dragon]

with all that new hardware did you check the power supply to see if it is big enough to handle the additional workload? If you still have the original power supply it is probably not near large enough.