Same problem encountered - my path to a solution?
Hi there,
I ran into the same problem when I bought a used board from someone.
I wasn't sure if it was the power supply or the board so I decided to replace the power supply since I was aching to buy a sonata 2
My system specs are:
AMD XP 2100+ ThoroughBred
1GB DDR400 (2x512mb AzenRam)
Asus A7V8X-X
MSI Geforce4 4200 ti agp
1x60GB Maxtor
1x60GB Western Digital
Pioneer DVDRW 107D
SoundBlaster Live 5.1
When I first assembled the system using my old case and power supply, I would get the green LED light but the system would not power on.
Since my last board had failed and wouldn't boot after the failure, I assumed it was the power supply that was bad (350W Sparkle Power International...what was I thinking??!).
I went and bought an Antec Sonata 2 which came with a 450W SmartPower 2.0 power supply.
I installed all the components and still encountered the same problem eventhough the sonata 2 case is amazing to work with
I then removed the board and all components and started with just the mb, cpu, ram and video and secured the motherboard with 3 screws instead of the 6 I had used before.
I pressed the power switch and it came up. I installed the other components one at a time and each time tested to see if the system would come on.
Finally I installed windows...everything was good...or so it seemed.
As soon as I went to swap out one of the harddrives for another one, my windows install would get corrupt forcing me to reinstall. Even attaching a floppy drive caused the same type of serious registry corruption in windows forcing me to reinstall or repair.
After about my 3rd reinstall, I decided to updated the bios to the latest version. Just to try my luck, I added another drive...this time there was no windows problem.
So in summary:
1) Make sure the board is not grounded somewhere. Even in the best cases this sometimes happens.
2) Don't use too many motherboard screws if you don't have to
3) Add components one at a time
4) Install windows
5) updated bios!!! rev 1013 was the latest stable version last time I checked.
-Roger