A friend and I built a new computer. Here are the specs:

Aspire case with 350w PS, 2 80mm case fans, temperature readout;
ASUS P5GDC Deluxe MB; integrated sound and RAID.
Pentium 4 540 CPU;
Kingston 1GB DDR2 ram;
2 Seagate SATA drives, 160GB; plugged into SATA 1 and SATA 2 as per instructions;
1 generic floppy drive;
1 Pacific Digital DVD DL drive;
1 Exact DVD rom drive;
(DVD drives are cabled together on 40-pin cable and plugged into Primary 1 connector)
ATI X700 PCI Express video card;
Thermaltake Jungle512 cooling fan/heat sink.

Everything is put together; I was able to run BIOS setup and specify that SATA drives are to be configured as RAID (I have not yet configured, however).

Here are problems I am running into:

Message at boot up: "CPU Fan error." According to ASUS manual, some 4-pin fans don't comply with Intel's fan specs. Result is that fan speed cannot be reduced, or even monitored by Setup utilities. Fan is working, however, but message repeats at every boot up. Hard to believe that Thermaltake fan would bad; may be best way to go is to replace?

Floppy drive: green light stays on. Any suggestions or advise on this? Smaller of connector cables (4? 5? pin, cant remember) is plugged to power supply -- is there a different location for this?)

RAID setup: Instructions call for hitting CTL-I at bootup to access the setup utility but repeat of "CPU fan error" asks for "hit F1 for help". When I hit F1, Setup closes and takes me to "Reboot" instruction. I can see the RAID setup instructions for a few seconds, but that's all.

Case has a thermometer on the front, not working. I discovered a small 2-pin type connector, which probably is for thermometer, but can't figure out where it gets plugged in. Any ideas?

All help is welcome. -- Judy

Hi,
floppy disk problem is mostly the cable isn't connected properly, try taking it out of the floppy disk, rotate it 180 and then plug it in again. Have you tried clearing CMOS to see if it gets rid of the cpu fan problem, it's just an idea, I'm no expert. You should hopefully be able to access RAID setup once you have the cpu problem sorted. As for the thermometer on the case, do you have the manual for the motherboard? It should tell you the connection.

Hey Judy & Louie.

To corect the floppy problem do as told above.

Are you sure you connected the CPU FAN in the corect place?? Check your mother board's manual to locate the CPU FAN pins.

Also i recomand you put optical drives on separate IDE cables, you especialy need to do this if you are going to burn CD/DVDs "on the fly"

GooD LucK!

It's nice to be important but it's more important to be nice...

Does your WinXP CD have SP1 or better already on the disk?

You need to connect a 3-pin fan to the cpu-fan connector on the motherboard (near the cpu socket). The 3 pins are for power, ground, and rpm. The motherboard needs to be able to detect the 3rd wire (rpm wire) to know if it's spinning or not. If it doesn't detect any rpm's, it thinks the fan has died/stopped, and will warn you before you overheat your cpu.

There are are some 3-pin fans that don't have tachometers (ability to report rpm's). Instead, the 3rd wire is a "stop signal" wire, which goes live when the fan has stopped.

Since you're using a 4-pin fan, you have no way to tell the motherboard that there is indeed a cpu fan, and that it's connected. Either you need a 2nd fan to plug into the motherboard, or you need to disable the fan monitoring for the cpu fan. You'll do this by going into BIOS, going to hardware monitor, and then disabling the cpu fan (select the cpu fan's rpm, and move it to disabled).

For floppy connectors, it's possible to not plug the power connector correctly (it could be just 1 pin off)...although your floppy drive would most likely catch on fire.

For the thermometer, there should be a probe connected to it. It'll be a long wire, with a flat piece of metal on the end. You position the metal plate on whatever you want to monitor for temps (ie: cpu, etc).

Thanks, everyone. I will go back under the hood and see if I can make the adjustments, and hope they work!

Judy, You didn't answer my question. The answer may be important to you, Please don't ignore questions.

Sorry, OtheHill,

didn't mean to overlook you. No, at this point the only software is the BIOS setup. Haven't gotten to the point where WIN XP is installed. Have to solve the other problems first.

Judy

I asked if the CD you have has SP1 as part of the disk. If not you are going to have issues installing to these drives.

I have WinXP Pro SP2. It will be a clean install.