Building a new PC - powers down shortly after boot

[Arakel]

Hi all,

I'm having slight issues with putting a new desktop together.

Having put the whole thing together, it seemed to fire up without a problem. The first thing I noticed, however, was that it was very, very slow. The Windows XP cd was detected in the drive, but then nothing seemed to happen beyond that. I considered going into the BIOS setup to check everything was working ok there, but I had to plug the keyboard in first.

When the keyboard was plugged in though, and I went to boot up again, the system ran (the CPU fan for certain) for about 1-1.5 secs, then shut down.

I'm pretty sure this is a short of some kind - although I'm fairly certain I isolated the mobo from the case correctly. The initial very slow boot confuses me, however - surely if there was a short, there is no way I could ever have go the system to boot up? Perhaps when I pushed the keyboard lead into the socket something moved, now causing the short? Or is it something else?

The specs:

AMD Athlon Barton XP2800+
MSI K7N2 Delta-ILSR
Corsair 512MB DDR TwinX (2x256MB) Platinum
LiteON 16x DVD-ROM
Seagate Barracuda 80GB 7200RPM
Asus V9570TD GeForce FX 5700 128MB
Antec TruePower 480W PSU

If there is anything I might be overlooking, please feel free to tell me!

The tower I purchased to build into had a weird setup I hadn't seen before - there were square shaped holes in it, which were directly below the holes in the mobo. Rather than the usual copper screws (which were included, but clearly were not for these holes) there were these little square clips which seemed to rest inside the holes. I'm fairly certain this was the right thing to do.

Any ideas?

[Geekgirl]

Was there a reason the keyboard wasnt already plugged in? If im not mistaking and correct me anyone if I am wrong but dont you need a keyboard and monitor to boot? You can boot without a mouse but need a keyboard.

Double check all your connections. Reseat your RAM and PCI adapters. I once had a simular problem and had to start at very begining to where I had nothing but mobo connected and booted quickly then added RAM then booted quickly and added 1 thing as I went booting after each one untill I figured the problem. It worked.

[Arakel]

The reason the keyboard wasn't connected was because I forgot.

I'm going to take it apart tomorrow if I can't work out what's wrong in the meantime. Likely it is something stupid, but hey...thought I'd cover my bases.

Thanks for the reply.

[Un4g1v3n]

Did you ever check to think maybe it's the power supply?

[Restek]

[Un4g1v3n]

[CaptainAnarchy]

Also check to make sure your heatsink fan is on properly

[noby]

if possible, try to boot it up out of the case, but not on the conductive bag.
Connect only memory, video, disk, CD, kb and mouse.
If it runs this way, you probably have a short somewhere

noby