Trying to help a friend's new build

[DJsRed]

A friend of mine upgraded their old system with the following items:

MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum
AMD 3000+ (939)
2x512 Corsair Value RAM 2.5 CAS
ATi x600

All of her other components are the same as in her old machine. They are:

WD 40 gig HDD
Pioneer 16x DL DVD burner
450 watt Coolmax PS

When assembled, the computer went from not detecting her drives, to hanging and not letting us in the bios, to not turning on. We checked all cables and connections, and the older components are known good stuff. We are totally stumped as a variety of internet searches have turned up nothing. Any help you can provide is appreciated.

 

[tweebel]

Ok..

Have you tried:
-Switching the PSU
-Booting with only one stick of RAM
-Booting with only RAM (one stick), CPU and graphics card (might want to try an old PCI card) and adding new components one at a time
-Clearing the CMOS


Are you sure you connected the additional 4 pin 12V mainboard suppply?

 

[dunklegend]

Try clearing the CMOS, reseat all the connectors and use the minimum stuff you can and try to turn it on again. Check that the CPU fan is working.
Post everything that you do and the result of each thing.

<font color=blue>If everything seems to be going well, you obviously don't know what the hell is going on</font color=blue>

 

[DJsRed]

Thanks for the help everyone. I'm still not entirely sure what the problem was, but it's up and running now, and seems stable. We took it out of the case, and powered up with the mobo/chip/ram. Then we added components one by one, and it worked just fine. It's running WinXP now like nothing was ever wrong. My only guess is that either the board was grounding out in the case cause we didn't mount it correctly, or we didn't connect the cables properly. As my friend said, "This is an Id10t error." 😉 Anyway, thanks again.