Okay, I just built the following: Athlon AMD XP 2600 Barton core Asus A7N8X deluxe Kingston HyperX 512MB pc3200 ATI Radeon 9600 XT Western Digital SATA 120G HDD I want to try and be thorough so sorry if i get wordy. For starters when i applied the thermal grease to the cpu the grease spread a little onto the area around the middle of the cpu. Could that be bad? if not we move on. Everything is installed the way it should be, Ive checked and checked and checked. One problem is that when i touch my case it has shocked me even to the point of turning itself off and on. I know that can't be good. So now for the problems with powering up. I push power the fans and and everything start up. It runs through the Flash utility screen. Bios is accessable. The next screen is SATA Raid push F4. Which is also accessable, i did a low level format to my hard drive, probably shouldnt've done that. So anyways, with the Lifegaurd CD that came with the hard drive in the CD rom, it takes me to a menu, where i can pick to launch lifegaurd tools, and 3 other opitons. When i press 1 to launch it, it will go to a solid colored screen, and then a black box with text will flash in the upper left corner, and then it navigates back to the menu screen. It will load sometimes, but when it does, while working through the HDD recognition, it will start scrolling an error message(fatal error TNT. something or another.)then stop scrolling and sit there. Now if i launch with a 3.5 boot disk of lifegaurd tools, it starts loading some things and then goes to a blank screen with a _ flashing in the top left corner. any suggestions on what i can do to fix these problems. anything will help thanks ryan

"I want to try and be thorough so sorry if i get wordy. For starters when i applied the thermal grease to the cpu the grease spread a little onto the area around the middle of the cpu. Could that be bad? if not we move on." Thermal grease should be coverd over the spot completely (from edge to edge of the contact point) with a thin layer. Second, I dunno why you would want to use lifeguard tools. What you need to do is use the latest and greatest XP boot disk. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=83F53BE9-28FA-40E8-8EC2-631504EF5E26 You should be able to load windows with that. If that don't work, I'm not sure what to tell ya...I dont have SATA (of course, it'd be pretty damn sweet on a laptop!) <CENTER> Created with the CoffeeCup HTML Editor</CENTER>

When i try to install Windows XP prof. it usually freezes up at the part where windows is "loading Executive files" it did go past that once where i got an error message saying something about if this is the first time i have seen this message then reboot, and if not something about FDISK. But i don't know how to get to that, i have no dos prompt. rpm900

Hi Ryan, First you need to find the cause of the short: a mounting screw misaligned, the edge of the case making contact with the motherboard, something to that effect. Also the thermal grease is only applied to the rectangular step upon the CPU, nowhere else. Regarding your hard drive, if it is truly SATA, you need to install the the SATA driver which you can get from Western Digital or off your Asus CD. Load the driver for SATA to a floppy disk. At the beginning of XP PRo set up, it'll prompt you to press F6, make sure you do this. A few moments later it will ask you to enter the driver, which you will do with your newly created SATA drive disk. From there, you should be able to partition and format your drive. However, before you do any of this, make sure you take care of the short you have. Tony

What may be going on is static discharge. If Ryan lives in the northern hemisphere the humidity in his home may be really low and that coupled with carpeting can cause the symptoms described. Are you sure that you have a SATA harddrive? Are you connecting it to the MB using an adapter? I looked at the ASUS website and don't see where that MB supports SATA harddrives.

Okay, Less problems now. I figured out the problem with the cd's not running. wrong bios setting!!! oh well. SO now about the shock thing, Othehill, youre right. I live in Las Vegas, Dry and carpet, but i have set my cp up on a wooden chair because i new the carpet would cause shocks. Yes, i have a SATA WD 120GB HDD. I believe my only problem is getting the drivers from my ASUS MOBO cd onto floppy and then i should be okay, outside of this shocking problem. What files do i need to send to floppy disk, nevermind thats already on a post. Well thank you anyways. any suggestions will help for the shocking, a thought thought, i have an areogate II with two fans plugged into it, and then my heatsink fan on MOBO, and a GPA two fan pci card type of thing, as well as a fan that just plugs into the PS. Could all these effect the shocking, for reference thats 4 regular (80mm) fans including heatsink fan and the GPA PCI dual fan card. Might help. anyways thanks ryan rpm900

Putting the computer up off the carpet isn't a solution. You are are picking up the static charge by walking across the carpet. When you touch the case it discharges from you to the case, which is grounded by the power cord. Problem is that you can damage components if the discharge goes thru components instead of the chassis. Does your motherboard have an onboard SATA controller?