Hey guys, This is my first post here, and I hope you all can help me. I'd like to think I'm very knowledgable when it comes to pc's but this one stumps me. Im building an extra pc just to mess around with, and my friend gave me some parts he doesn't use. Athlon XP 1.2 Ghz KT7A-Raid and some harddrives Now here's the problem. I dont have a case for it, and its sitting on my desk with foam under it... screwdriver to turn it on, you know how it is. Anyways, got everything hooked up and wired. Turn it on... posts fine, get the usual no OS... blah blah... Restart it to put in my xp cd... Go into bios, change the first boot to CDROM... SAVE! Reboot. It wont post, or anything, blank screen... Not even bios comes up. So I clear cmos, unplug the psu, and plug it in and reset the cmos jumper, boots up fine... but WITHOUT the settings i changed. I cant change the settings to anything I need. I can't set it to boot from floppy or CDrom. Everything seems to work, just wont save so I can't really do much with this hardware because I can't get it to go beyond the POST. Because I can't load windows or anything without first booting from CDrom. So I thought it was a battery, nope... Thought it was the bios, so I Miraculously flashed the bios... to no avail. Please help me guys...!!! Thanks in Advance Scizzy

Try to set the cd to 2nd boot hd to 1st, since the hd is blank? it will look @ cdrom, is your xp cd an original or backup w/autorun capabilities? If none will work, try to use a startup disk from xp(don't know if xp uses this) if not try one from me/98/95 just to get you to the cd.

I would disconnect the drives and maybe pull all the cards (except the video card of course) and see if that makes any difference. I'm especially suspicious of the cdrom drive.

Just an idea, take the HDD out, put it into your working PC, install just Windows, take it out and put it into your PC, I have done this many times as with some PC I build at work or refurbished old ones, some never seem to boot for CD or floppy ________________________ MSI KT8 NEO Athlon 64 3200+ @ 2.0ghz 1.0 GB DDR PC3200 2X 160 GB HDD Hightech Excalibur Radeon 9800 Pro Iceq 128mb ( Core 425 MHz and Memory 380 MHz )