Difficult problem concerning newly built PC

I'm struggling with this fucking thing.

Everything is connected correctly. I've made sure of that. The diagnostics run and everything is honky dory, until it gets past them. After the BIOS does its thing, an error message comes up on the next screen telling me a file in windows is missing. This hard drive has never even SEEN windows. It's brand new.

It tells me some file is missing or corrupt and to re-copy the file. It will not go beyond this screen. It will not boot from the CD drive, and if I touch ANYTHING, it won't even turn on the display when I boot it up. The disc drive is IDE while the 2 hard drives are SATA. i don't think that's a problem....

The disc drive came out of a Dell B110 because the one I ordered is incompatible with my power supply. I'll be getting a new one but I can't seem to get the Dell disc drive to read ANY discs. It never makes that whir that tells you it's reading the disc, but it doesn't make any unhealthy noises either. It worked fine in the Dell it came in.

Does Dell just block the ability to use their drives in other PC's?

And why the hell does it not even display almost randomly when I turn it on sometimes?


Please help, I'm lost.....

 

see if you can get a friend to maybe burn you a new Windows startup disk. if not, Salvation Army, good Will, etc. always have good, dirt cheap computers that just need to be fixed up a bit. try building your own as well; my boyfriend has a lot of fun with that. We have some really nice, big, powerful, fast, computers that he put together and fixed up from Goodwill and Salvation Army.

 

ah, this was built custom by me actually. I bought all the parts and built it from the ground up.

I'm thinking the motherboard has been installed improperly, and I'm gonna mess around with that for awhile.

 

Yep, sounds like a motherboard problem to me.

I hope that's not the case, though. Have you tried testing the drives on other computers?

set them in slave mode and scour the drive to see if anything is on there that could be corrupting the boot process.

 

Motherboard ? Sure, maybe the board drivers have been loaded wrong.

But....The OP clearly states that they are getting a windows error from a brand new hard drive. That suggests...if anything, that the drive isnt new...and isnt blank, which would be odd.

 

Yes, let me update everyone on my status.

The problems have gotten more serious. The CMOS has been acting up quite a lot. I have to reset it every single time I turn the machine on or nothing will display on the monitor. The diagnosics always tell me 'CMOS checksum error - defaults loaded'. This one hell of a nusience and I have no idea how to fix it. The PC can get past the diagnostics but it doesn't change the fact that the CMOS needs to be reset every time I turn it on.

How might i format the hard drive without an OS? Because I get that windows error if/when I get past diagnostics anyway. And anyone have any idea what this CMOS thing is about? The machine does have a floppy drive as well

 

why can't you format the drive from another computer?

if your on a laptop, you can buy a usb adapter that will plug into your drive and you should be able to format it from there.

 

There are only two possibilities.

1) Dead CMOS battery. Replace it with a brand new one from a package that has never been opened. This may actually fix all of the problems.

2) ElectroStatic Discharge. This is the result of improper installation of the mobo or something else. You are not supposed to touch anything without an antistatic wrist strap secured to a ground source. There are other complicated things behind this too but I won't even go there. It takes 30 volts of static to kill a circuite, it takes 3,000 volts of static before the nerves in skin even begin to feel it. (other hints: carpet, temperatures, low humidity, friction; all combined with touching a circuit board)

You should pray the problem is number 1. There is no fix for number 2. All I could say is sorry, try again but this time use a grouded wrist strap.

 

The most important thing is to never let any computer get the best of you since they are nothing more than glorified calculators. Never give up and you will prevail in the end...

 

Probably a motherboard problem. Reminds me of when i had an abit mobo and Kingston HyperX ram modules that were "advertised to work with the particular mobo i had", I had to raise the DDR voltage +0.2v to get them to work.... mobos are funky