PCTech Forums

Update

Got it to read CD Rom drive now. Now it goes up to "press any key to boot from CD" and stays stuck here.

This may not make much sense but i'll try to explain my thought. First let me say, check the power supply. Swap it out if you have another one. If i understand your specs right your running dual processors with 4 sticks of memory, HDD and CD rom drive all on a 250 watt psu. If i read your specs right, that psu is way too small for all that hardware and is possibly showing you the result. Hanging up while trying to access the cd is a sign that its lacking the power to spin up properly and starving everything else in the process. It just may be a problem elsewhere but i feel like the PSU is going to be an issue. I would have to recommend 350 to 400 watts. You can also try to strip it to the bare essentials, pull 3 of the ram sticks, pci cards and unplug power from anything you dont need such as a second cdrom or hdd if present and see if it will boot.

thank you for replying...
ok, i disconnected the power to everything but the hard drive, the two processors and one memory stick was left in,(taking a closer look i realized the memory sticks were 512mb and not 256mb) i turned it on and still hangs in same place as b4.
today is sunday so tommorrow i will buy new 450W psu and install to see if that works.
also, is having more memory gigs than processor gigs a problem, cus i just realized i have 2gigs of ram and 1 gig of process.?

AAAAAAaaaaarrgghhh!!!!!
i took out the HDD that i was using to test this PC, and put it back into the pc it came from (cus my son was complaining he wanted his HDD back) now its saying that the operating system is not found, but before that it said something about ntfs.sys....
now i know how to fix this problem, but why would this happen?
is my mobo or something within corrupting my hard drive?
if im bieng to vague and i need to further explain i will be more than happy to do so....

By process of elimination, i have almost come to the conclusion that somethings either wrong with my processors or my motherboard.
I say almost because, i'm not realy sure, as i have only been involved with the insides of computers for about 3 1/2 months now.
Ive gotten this far only by reading and hands on.
But i cant find anywhere that tells me how to check mobo's or proso's
for failures...
can anyone direct me or if someone knows how please help me out.

To answer you current question, the only way to test a motherboard or CPU is to:
Swap out the current CPU with a known good one if the system boots then it’s the CPU if it doesn’t boot then it’s the MB.
In you case you would have to swap out each cpu with the known good one.

The fact that the system will POST (Power On Self Test) make me think that it’s not the MB or CPU.
It sounds like the system fails when its trying to read from the cd.
Do you have a different CD Rom drive you could try?

Also is the hard drive recognized in the BIOS?

Lastly it could be the BIOS itself that is corrupted, that would answer why the HDDs come up with volume errors.
You could try flashing the BIOS

they are the sticks from the pc im trying to fix, i thought maybe they would work on other board...

but that just gave me an idea....
i'll be back with results...