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Alright well a friend of mine has an old computer that he built and he said the motherboard was messed up so he bought a new motherboard, new memory, and a new CPU. I put everything in and everything is connected how it's supposed to be. I turned on the computer and the power LED and fan both turn on, but that's it. NONE of the drives boot up. The power supply is new and working, I tested all of the connections and they all work. I'm pretty positive that EVERY drive didn't go out at once.

I have the power cable plugged into the motherboard and the CPU is in and secure. He didn't get a fan but he strapped his old one on and plugged it in. I plugged all the drives in to the power and the motherboard. All the pin connectors are in correctly. One thing though, the power LED has two seperate connectors, a + and a -. On the motherboard there are two +'s and a -. It goes ++-. I plugged in the second + and the -. The power LED goes on though so I guess it works.

What the hell's going on?! haha. I just don't get how the drives won't even go on, the connections work and they're plugged in, the drives should at least power up.. Someone help me out with this.

Hi Roryt2000,

Try the drives in another computer for starters.

You're friend may have been right, the board's IDE controllers might be messed up.

Yup, DAR is right, this sounds like a IDE controller issue (or at least motherboard). One quick thing to try is to take out the bios battery (with the power cable OUT) for a good 5 mins and then replace it.

No, it's the brand new motherboard.

Hi Roryt2000,

Try unplugging all the drives and see if you get a BIOS message that no drives are detected, if you do not, this might be a faulty board. If you do get the message, try plugging one drive in at a time.
Good luck

I unplugged them from the motherboard and left the power in, they turn on now. Still nothing comes on the screen. I'm using onboard video and audio. I'm guessing this is a faulty motherboard. What do you guys think I should do? Do you think maybe I didn't connect it correctly? Is there somethign else I'm supposed to do? Is the hard drive supposed to first be formatted maybe?

You might have to. Was there anything on the drives to begin with? Are they from another computer? Can you boot from cd? If so check to see if the disks are partitioned. Don't mess with the partitions unless you're not worried about losing anything.