System won"t boot!!! Please Help....

[minion]

Hi, Guys I"m haveing a Hell of a Problem putting together this system for my Mom..You see I just Upgraded My system to a 2.53ghz p-4 and a asus MotherBoard From a 1.7ghz Celeron and a Gigabyte Board, so I figured I would The Upgrade My mothers 800mhz P-3 with the 1.7ghz Celeron, so I got an extra Case and Put the Gigabyte Board in it and the 1.7 Celeron then took My moms Hard drive and Cd-Rom and Put it in the Case and Hooked everything up and when I start it up I go into the Bios and Configure everything and then Go to boot it up and it just Hangs there, the Bios screen comes up and it does the memory test and then tries to boot from the Cd-Rom then after that it is supposed to try to boot from the Hard drive, but it Just hangs there with the Cursur Blinking..The wierd thing is that I can access the Hard drive Cuz I tried to reinstall My OS to see if that would fix it But all it did was reformat the disk then reinstall the opperateing system then when that was done it tried to restart and boot up and it just hung there and did nothing, I have tried Putting both the cd and hard drives on the same ide and on seperate ide"s, and changed the boot order even Put the Hard drive as all three Boot Drives ,I cleared the CMOS, Checked all the Jumper settings, checked the Ram modules to make they were in Right, changed the Flopy drive(Neither of them are in good shape)..Then I thought Maybe I did something with the Hard Drive when Changeing it over so I put everything Back into the Old 800mhz Case and it booted up Fine with no problem Accept now Windows XP is asking me to activate Windows and won"t let me saying I have allready done it too many times (twice)(My mom"s going to be Pissed at me) I know someone here Can help me out, Ive tried Pretty Much everything I can think of to get it to boot from the Hard drive but I am totally lost ..So if anyone can help me out here with what can possibly be wrong I would be very greatfull...ThanX a Lot Folks......

PS: the Only Other thing I can think of is the Flopy drive Because both of the Floppys I tried were really old and I didn"t really know if they worked, and while booting it wouldn"t boot to floppy either, but i just didn"t thing it could have such an effect...ThanX

[VIPER_1069]

have you tried a different cd rom drive in the system !? i know u say it works but maby just try a different one !?

alternativly try trouble shoot by disconnecting everything but the hard disk and get it to boot the hard disk on its own without a floppy drive or cdrom, then reconnect the floopy and try booting if it boots then try the cdrom connect it and try booting if it fails then the cdrom is the problem...likewise if it fails with just the floppy connected then its the floppy


also in bios look for a setting that says something like halt on errors and change it to halt on none

[NetLion]

Did you check the power supply ?

Asus MB are critical in power requeriments.

[minion]

The Power supply is a 350W and a Good Quality one so I know it isn"t that , And the MotherBoard that I"m working on is a Gigabyte not an the Asus(AsRock) Board,This is the exact same setup I have been useing for the last 6 months accept that I"m useing a Different Hard drive and CD-Rom, that Both check out OK, anyway thanks for the sugestions, if anyone can think of anything else Please Post it...ThanXX

[weboneando]

Check if your HD is in MASTER mode then get in the BIOS and set manually your HD don´t let it to autodetect, also take out everything and leave just the HD and try to boot this way.

[Irish Bear]

Hi minion,
I have seen this problem as well. The c:\drive would format, would take sys, and opperating system; but would not boot. When I used the Dir command I could see all the files. I used FDISK and the primery partition was not active. So I just set it active and away it went..........Irish Bear.