i am building a new system, and everything seems fine. except one major problem, whenever it tries to boot up, the pc shuts itself down. now, everything is fine when i am in the bios, but as soon as it tries to boot from an xp cd, it shuts down.

i have a feeling something is wrong (duh) and the pc is protecting itself by shutting down, but I HAVE NO IDEA what the hell is wrong! please help!

 

Once you make your sig smaller, we'll help.

 

gotcha.. fixed it

 

hehe, thanx

Is your system overclocked at all? What about heat...what is your BIOS reading as your CPU temperature? One more thing I would check is the memory, how many sticks do you have in, what do you have, and what are the memory timings? When a system doesn't POST, it's usually CPU or memory related.

If you have more than one stick of memory in, try it with just one, then add another etc etc. There are programs you can download to test memory, I'll have to find them, but I'll wait for your response first.

 

When you try booting from the XP cd, what happens,,,,,"exactly"?

This sounds like it is probably another board in conflict with the video card. Is this a newly assembled PC or one that has worked before? What is your hardware configuration? Are the controllers new, old or a mix? Are they PNP? Has this hardware configuration ever worked? Do you have any "known good" components? Is this a system that you have upgraded with new components or is this a completely new system. Did you assemble this from scratch or did you buy a system prebuilt?

I need a lot more details if we're to help you.

 

Does the system pass the POST?

 

Your PC is probably rebelling at the fact that you are trying to load XP. Try installing linux instead... you'll get a lot more done.

 

Woops, I assumed it didn't make it past POST. Umm yea, what boiler said, what do you mean when it tries to boot XP?

 

everything is brand new, except for an older video card that i was planning to use before i get my new one. p4 3.0 with 1 stick of 512ram

when i turn it on, everything is fine untill it tries to boot off the cd (installing windows) and the pc just shuts off/powers down

 

do you hear any beeps? normally it'll beep on bootup if there is a problem--if so, check the motherboard manual to see what the beep means.