Good evening, each. I've made the elementary mistake of installing a usb pci card before the drivers, and the os has taken extreme exception! After powering up the machine goes thru as far as showing the windows logo then powers off again. When I try entering bios setup it shuts down as soon as I select advanced options (to rearrange boot order so that I can get it to boot from ide hdd instead of sata). Booting from xp cd goes as far as "starting Windows" then powers off. It's thesame whether the pci card is in or out. Asus a7n8x-e de luxe mobo, Athlon cpu, 2 Gb , xp pro os, radeon 9800 graphics card, wd 320 Gb sata, 80 Gb ide. I was putting pci card in because I couldn't seem to get usb 2 drivers for the mobo to install and the sockets on the mb weren't functioning despite device manager's claims that they were! I've since acquired driver cd for themobo, but can't make a great deal of sense of theread me. I'm an old bloke who's just found the joys of tinkering under the bonnet of my computer so be patient with me,please.

pretty much after windows xp sp2, microsoft decided that all this mess from each company trying to write drivers for usb2 needed to stop

onboard usb2 is usually handled by the northbridge chipset, having that driver loade is all you want

onboard usb suffers from a weak power supply and overloaded limited power bus

some usb pci cards will not work in certain pci slots on particular motherboards and certain setups

try another slot

Thanks for that. Trouble is the thing won't boot into windows befor shutting down, with or without the card in. So I can't try any of your suggestions at the moment. I'm using my laptop at present - lucky it's my practice machine I annoyed!

sounds like the power supply may be on the way out

Hi,
As a temp measure you could try disconnecting your Sata drive from inside your machine (take all normal personal safety and antistatic precautions)
(I am assuming here that your IDE hard drive contains your operating system?)

Fitting a PCI card should not have affected the boot priority in the BIOS..........
If you have been in the BIOS and altered some settings...don't worry, but let us know and either DaChew or I (or someone here) will post back with instructions for you.
Regards
paws

present situation - pci card removed. OS is on sata. next move was to try installing Ubuntu on ide. Wanted to adjust boot order in bios to get it to boot Ubuntu and see what happened then. Sata is disconnected from power at present. My psu is plenty powerfull enough, 500 watts at least if I remember right from when I put it in before christmas, modular supply lines from half a dozen screw in four,three,and two pin sockets,Hiper make. As it powers off at booting os or entering bios to adjust, I was thinking to boot off cd, install Ubuntu on ide, then see what I find.

Have just tried running Ubuntu off cd, powered off while loading preparitary to booting.

Sorry, Paws. I didn't answer one of your questions. No, I haven't changed any boot settings. Boot order is - cd/dvd ; scsi; ide hdd. Fdd boot is enabled. I was going to swap scsi and ide hdd round but the machine powered off when I tried to access the menu. Is it likely that i'm just wasting time and the mobo is effectively dead?

Hi,
There are some inconsistencies here.........
In your first post you said you were trying to get your machine to boot from your IDE drive not SATA
In post 6 you say that your operating system is on SATA.......
This may be the problem?
(your machine can only boot from the drive that has your operating system on it.)
Regards
paws

I'll try to be clearer. Firstly I installed the pci card , then its driver. Then I switched on my computer. It powered off before booting windows. After checking cables, connections etc, and several other attempts to boot up with same result, I tried booting from my windows cd. no good. So I tried to get into bios setup to check cd boot was top of the list and tosee if there was anything else I could see might be causing the problem, and it powered down as it was entering the boot order screen in bios. then I disconnected the sata with the os on it to see if it would boot windows or ubuntu off cd in case it was windows corrupted. It still powers off at the sight of an operating system! since then I've left it alone and sought assistance. Widows xp pro sp2. Ubuntu 2006 live disc (previously worked fine both off cd and installed.) .....Chris

try another optical drive, if that doesn't boot those cd's, it might be the power supply, new hiper or not?

You can also try removing any extras like floppy, case fans, extra hard drives and see if that releases enough power

most good bios's have a section showing voltages

I just wasted a day or so with one that was slowly dying

I ended up attempting to reload windows twice before I tried a different power supply



This post has been edited by DaChew: May 2 2008, 08:07 AM

Thanks for that. I'll try all those. I have a spare psu, as well as several items I can disconnect.

good job, Da Chew. You've cracked it! I dismantled it all, put my old generic 375 watt tin psu in, and gradually reinstalled the bits. went sweet as a nut. Even when I put it to some work by running two dvd's while doing scans for viruses and spyware with separate avg programmes. I've lost the smart blue paint and lights and modular wiring of the posh psu(rataed at 580 watts with max of 630) which is a dissappointment. It seemed so much better quality than my old one that I'd have gone a long time trying everything else before suspecting that. Now I can see about getting usb's working with the mobo cd I now have, or installing the pci properly. Thanks a lot both to you and Paws.

Glad you got it fixed, but it looks like DaChew came up with the answer.....so all credit to him (and you)
Regards
paws

Back in august 2006 I reccomended a PS to a poster that was having issues burning dvd's in a generalpc subfrorm I moderate, I did some research and this one was the best price for the highest reviews

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx...N82E16817104934

he came back this janurary saying how he had to put the old superalienx PS back in when his spare FSP wouldn't work, he called and they said send the FSP one back,







now that's a company that stands behind their products