Trouble with Mobo Boot Screen

[Mr_Bojingles]

A friend of mine just recently received the parts for his new computer. I went to his house to help him with the building but when you boot the computer it hangs forever on the motherboard boot screen.

If hit "del" to get into bios, it takes forever to go. Or if I try to boot normally the system hangs before getting past the motherboards boot screen.

The motherboard is the DFI Lan Party with the Nforce2 ultra chipset. I have limited experience with raid, and this board has it, so i am unsure if there is something special I need to do.

I currently have the hard drive and cd-rom on the IDE primary and secondary. I also tried to boot from a windows cd to install xp pro, but it it seems to hang at every step of the way to the screen where is loading the temp. drivers just to run setup.

Any Ideas? I am at college right now, so I probably won't get back to the computer tonight, so any help is welcome!

[BDR]

Try a different stick of ram and see if that helps.

[Mt_Goat]

Also try unplugging all drives, HDD's, optical and floppy to see if it boots any faster. Then set default settings in the bios and re-boot and only set the fsb to match the fsb of the CPU. If it is still slow then do as BDR recomended and swap the ram. What PSU is he using?

[Crypto]

Are you using the raid facility?
Is there are a jumper to set on the m/b to enable raid?

It could be that, if you are not using raid, but it thinks you want it, it's searching for the raid controller.

(just happened to me on my Asus A7N8X board))

Cheers

Crypto

Crypto :D

[Bud]

yea check the raid raid jumper i had problems with that too on my Asus A7N8X deluxe

[Mr_Bojingles]

Thanks for the help everyone. I just got back to working on that computer and I unplugged all of the ide devices/floppy, and it booted past the screen with no problem. So I am going to play with it for awhile and see what I can do.

[Mr_Bojingles]

alright, she's purring like a kitten :D I reset to fail-safe defaults plugged the drives back in, then did optimal defaults. Afterwards I installed Windows without a hitch.

BTW, i was flipping throught the manual and looking at the mobo itself, but I never saw a jumper to disable raid.

thanks again for the help :respect:

[Tacoguy]

WooHoo ! glad you got running. This is a maddening experience. I once got a batch of Intel P4 boards (6 of them) that I could not fire up and had a couple of other tech people look at and none of us could get them running. :banghead:

Turns out there were no posted bugfixes and when RMA all the boards, the new batch fired up without a hitch.

Never got any explanation why and to this day ... bugs me as I spent days trying

Best

Taco