Building a New Computer - Diagnosing My POST Problem

[Updates below.]

Man, I've got all these great pictures of the installation and assembly of the new box and the damn thing won't do squat when turned on except for

1. light up the green power LED
   
2. engage the rear exhaust fan at the low speed setting that I set
   
3. light up the keyboard LEDs
   
4. engage AMD's stock CPU cooling fan
   
5. energize the hard drive (I think)

I swear this has nothing to do with the several beers I had that evening! And let me tell you, there isn't much that'll sober me up faster than a computer that gives me the bird after I treat it nicely. Kept the cat out of it and everything!

I built it in this order:

1. CPU & heatsink/fan
   
2. RAM
   
3. video card
   
4. IEEE 1394 header to the front connection
   
5. USB header to the front connection
   
6. audio header to the front connections
   
7. PC speaker, hard drive LED, case reset switch, power LED, case power switch
   
8. floppy ribbon cable from motherboard to drive
   
9. SATA hard drive cable from motherboard to drive
   
10. power cables from power supply to floppy and hard drives
    
11. audio cable from motherboard to optical drive
    
12. IDE ribbon cable from motherboard to optical drive
    
13. power cable from PS to optical drive
    
14. power cable from PS to motherboard
    
15. Advanced Air Chassis Guide (ACAG) air duct put back together and installed over the motherboard; shroud adjusted over CPU fan
    
16. power cable from PS to front bezel LEDs
    
17. USB header to 42-in-1 card reader

Voila. Close the case, plug in monitor cable and keyboard. Dig out the case's power cable and plug it into an outlet and the power supply. Attach Antec logo to front of the case. Stick the AMD sticker at an accidentally off-angle at the lower right case corner.

Ready. Set. Go!

No beeps. No video. Just the aforementioned LED and fan activity. I don't remember if the floppy light turned on. Hitting the power switch doesn't turn the system off. Hm. I now I am getting some signal through the video cable because when I kill the system's power via the power supply's On/Off switch and then unplug the monitor cable, the CRT goes into standby mode just like it does on my current system.

Repeated attempts gain no ground. Damn you, Hope.

So I decided to RTFM. Chapter 4, Section 2 is "Troubleshooting" and the relevant portion of the table in 4.2 is:

Probable	Solution
System inoperative. Keyboard lights are on, power indicator lights are lit, and hard drive is spinning.	Using even pressure on both ends of the DIMM, press down firmly until the module snaps into place.

Biostar apparently thinks this is indicates a RAM issue. I remind the reader that the parts in question are a retail Biostar NF4UL-A9 motherboard and a single OEM stick of Crucial 1GB 184-Pin SDRAM DDR 400.

Here are some shots I took of that part of the install on Sunday:

The RAM. That was the extent of its packaging, though as I said previously, it was also enclosed in a cardboard box containing other items.

When installed in the case, this is the top right hand corner. It took some effort to snap the bastard into place. I left the pink anti-static foam mat under the mobo the entire time and when I finally got the RAM in the slot and moved the board to the case, the pressure I had to use left a clear indention in the foam of the RAM slots' surrounding parts. I honestly thought once or twice that I'd snap something.

I concede it is possible I've seated the stick wrong. After the minor league tug-of-war to get the thing in there and secure the two latches at either end, I visually inspected the bus to make sure all the contacts were evenly lowed into the slots.

Click to see a larger picture from a different angle

Looks proper to me. Nothing seemed out of place. You can't insert it backwards due to the offset cut in the RAM board that matches to an offset notch in the connector on the motherboard. But I'll take the stick out and put it back in there before trying something else.

There are four slots to insert memory. Perhaps I have the RAM in the wrong slot? That'd be real damn annoying. Is there something intrinsic to the ATX/AMD standard that requires one to use a certain slot when only one piece of RAM is used? If so, and if I must place a single stick in a specific slot for the machine to work, that represents an electrical engineering hump someone needs to freakin' overcome. This is the age of Plug 'n Play, dammit.

On page 2 of the manual a table reads:

DIMM1	SS/DS	*	SS/DS	SS/DS
DIMM2	*	*	*	SS/DS
DIMM3	*	SS/DS	SS/DS	SS/DS
DIMM4	*	*	*	SS/DS

SS stands for single side DDR memory module and DS stands for double side memory module. The asterisk stands for an empty DIMM socket. At this point I should mention that NewEgg reviewers say the manual is wrong on how to install dual channel RAM. A representative sample:

...manual doesn't tell you how to set up RAM in Dual channel mode correctly, according to the manula you're supposed to place 2 dims in slot 1 and slot 3, this will cause it to boot in single channel, you have to color match the slots to get dual channel performance

Anyway...

Illustration via the mobo manual

The single piece of RAM I have is in DIMM1, and unless I'm misreading the manual, there's nothing wrong with putting it there. DIMM3 looks like an option, though, and I'll try it later tonight. Hell, I'll keep trying slots until one works.

If that fails, I'll unplug the optical drive, card reader, and all the headers save for the connections in Step 7 in the second list above. If booting into bare bones mode fails and the problem continues, I'm going to assume this is an issue with the stick of RAM I've got. Then - and only then - will I let this get to me.

Be back in a few.

UPDATED 12/21/2005 12:10am
Moving the memory module from DIMM slot to DIMM slot didn't change anything. I tried each of the three possible places and the outcome was the same each time. I can confirm the hard drive is spinning but the LED isn't lighting up. Neither are the floppy or optical drive lights. I might have bought a bad stick of RAM.

Tomorrow I'll try a bare-bones boot and see if that makes any difference.

UPDATED 1/23/2006 7:09pm

• Building a New Computer - The Past, the Present, and the Parts
  
• Building a New Computer - The Antec Sonata II Case
  
• Building a New Computer - The Guts Are Here
  
• Building a New Computer - POST Problems
  
• Building a New Computer - Complete!
  
• Building a New Computer - POST Revisited

Posted by Drizzten at December 20, 2005 03:09 PM