A friend of mine has just bought a second hand Abit KT7A Raid motherboard with an Athlon 2000 XP cpu and 256MB of Crucial RAM. I gave him a hand to set it all up. We put the jumper to reset the cmos but switching on it fails to complete the POST - no beep although there is some sign of the hard-drive being accessed initially but nothing on the screen. He replaced the CMOS battery with the one from his old board and that didn't cure it. We tried disconnecting as many bits as possible - CD floppy drive the connectors for the hard drive diode light etc.. took out and replaced the CPU all to no avail. We found the link http://computing.net/windows95/wwwboard/forum/111760.html on Computing.net with the same problem and followed the suggestions, disconnecting all the drives and the graphics card leaving just the psu, the motherboard, cpu and memory, but again no joy. The board may be a dud I guess or maybe the cpu. The power supply should be okay because it was previously running an ATX board no problem and reinstalling the old board again, it boots fine. We’ve run out of ideas on what now, anybody have any suggestions? Thanks Andrew

I think you've done everything you can. Selling a fairly new motherboard like that, makes me suspect that it was sold because it was defective? BTW, you probably just heard the hard drive cycling up. Since you didn't get a POST beep, it wasn't being accessed.

Greg, I fear you may be right. However, I bought the same - but non RAID - KT7A motherboard with a 1600 XP cpu and 256 MB of RAM for £75 (US $120) whereas he paid £150 (US $240) for the RAID version with 2000 XP and 750MB Ram. I think I got quite a bargain although he evidently didn't! Still, it shows bargains are there for the finding.. I'm still in the market for suggested solutions though. One possibility is to swap the CPU just to check it is not a CPU problem? Regards Andrew

It's the CPU. That motherboard can take a 1.2 mhz max. Won't boot with anything faster.

Techtony, thanks for the posting. I think you're right here. Yes, the KT7A will run with a 2000 cpu but it needs a bios upgrade. I bet the guy my friend bought it from assumed it would work with the 2000 cpu but failed to upgrade the bios - hence no boot. Thanks very much for the suggestion. A definite to investigate! I'll post the result back here. Andrew

The board and processor were tested out by a local firm and found to be fried!