I'm hoping someone can help me - I've wracked my brain and can't for the life of me figure out where the problem is.
Yesterday, I purchased an Gigbyte x48-DQ6, Intel Q9300 and a Coolermaster Real Power Pro 850w powersupply.
I installed this in my existing case and used my existing drives; a 250gb
SATA drive, a 40gb IDE drive (both Seagates) and LG DVD-RW.
The
ram was also new - I'd purchased it from MSY a few weeks ago as part of this upgrade: 2x2gb Adata DDR2 (800).
So I get my new goodies home and put it together with no problems, start it up and it whirrs right to life and posts fine.
Then restarts.
Same thing happens again.
Posts, then before it even gets to loading winxp, it restarts.
So, I went into the
bios and everything looked fine, restart the computer and it again starts fine, posts then loops back and restarts again.
At first I thought, even though it was the new ide cable that came with the DQ6, maybe it was a bum one. So I tried my previous ide cable - still looped.
Checked all the jumper settings on my drives, no difference.
Tried disconnecting all drives but the ide drive, no difference.
All but the
SATA drive, no difference.
All but the DVD-RW, no difference.
Tried checking the
ram by putting one stick in at a time and then repeating this in each of the memory channels, no difference.
So I thought maybe, for whatever reason, a newer
bios might fix it, so I downloaded the latest
bios from the GB site onto a usb stick and then flashed it using the q-flash utility in the
bios.
No difference - still posts fine, memory tests, recognises the drives, then goes to the next screen then restarts.
I tried resetting
cmos, leaving the battery out for an hour, both made no difference.
Still posts, recognises the drives goes to the next
post screen then loops.
I don't think it can be the drives, because they worked fine before and if the ide drives for some odd reason went bad, that doesnt explain why the
SATA drive does the same thing.
I was wondering about the
ram-but a search of the internet even had the same
ram being used in a review of the motherboard.
I'm worried that it may be the south bridge on the board, as it runs both the ide and
sata controllers and that seems to be where the issue is.
Does anyone have any suggestions or ideas?
I've run out of them and now have a splitting headache.
Thank you in advance for any help you can provide.