System will not boot up (power problems?)

Huge thanks once again for the reply dpp, unfortunately I've given up on that board and have resorted back to using the old one;

Probably worth noting that this is a completely seperate problem and in no way relates to what I've said above ^

The old board's in, and it boots up fine. In fact, it gets to the Windows login screen really quickly, you hit enter to login, and then it just hangs. It doesn't load, but it doesn't do anything until you press ctrl, alt and del, and then it loads up the desktop very quickly too.

No problems with that, until you try to access something (even My Computer for example) that tries to see the CD drive and then that window just completely stops responding, the computer carries on just fine though, so if you wanted to load up My Documents for example it does it without a problem, whilst My Computer is struggling along in the background.

I've tried running an IDE check in the BIOS too; it comes up saying it's found the hard drive which 'passes' the test, but it can't find anything else, just takes ages and then says "No IDE device found" for the other three slots/ports or whatever they're called.

Any suggestions would be very welcome, and I'm really sorry for keep dragging this thread back up, but I really, really want to get this sorted

 

I've just swapped the IDE cables around (at the motherboard end) and it's now detecting the CD-RW drive; I assume that means the IDE slot on the motherboard is dead and thus the motherboard is now useless?

 

I've just tried connecting the HDD and CD drive using the same cable now, and it's still only detecting one drive. I'm completely at a loss with this :/

 

Scrap that, nothing is working at all now; I've just tried all sorts of IDE/jumper combinations and it isn't detecting either of the CD drives nor the HDD. Tried using the exact original set up for the hard drive too; coming up saying no boot device and it can't see the HDD at all. FFS!

 

Please disregard anything I've said in this thread - this is now a slightly different issue to what I was having before, and definitely a different issue to the computer now powering up.

Basically, I'm using the old motherboard at the moment it runs very quick until it either logs in or does something that requires a CD drive. I went into My Computer -> Manage -> Disk Management which hung and took ages to load; but when it did, the computer realised there wasn't a CD drive present and everything was running incredibly quickly. I logged off and on again, the desktop came up within a few seconds; great! Now all I need is an external CD-RW and I'm away, right?

Wrong! Rebooted the system and had the same problem, it's still looking for the bloody CD drives! Question is, how do I stop Windows from searching for them and remove them for good? If I can do this I'm just going to get an external drive and I'm sure everything will then run very smoothly, I just need to stop Windows from searching for the drives that atm just aren't there. Any advice would be fantastic, thank you!

 

I've made a little progress; it can see both of the CD drives now at least! \o/

Still having problems with it randomly hanging in Windows, maybe random isn't the right word, but upon logging on and logging off it takes absolutely ages and just sits there idly without loading anything, likewise when I try to open My Computer or similar. It still speeds up considerably (in fact, it speeds up to 'normal' speeds) as soon as I run Disk Management and it realises what drives are there, which is really odd.

Any suggestions before I try a format please? I know it may be the only option, but I'd be installing an XP SP2 and apparently Dell machines don't like that at all; not to mention I don't have the original drivers!

 

Have tried removing and re-adding the drives using Disc Manager, have tried doing a Windows repair but can't because it has XP Pro installed but the CD I have is XP home and am currently running AVG but it hasn't found anything as yet.

I think a lot of these problems came about when she tried installing her new broadband/wireless router, I've just noticed the firewall is disabled and when trying to re-enable it I'm presented with this error - http://img264.imageshack.us/img264/8067/925071245dt.jpg - could it be related?

 

Hmm, just when I thought I was getting somewhere, it's now coming up with an error saying something along the lines of "ntoskrnl.exe is missing or corrupt" - absolute nightmare!

I've just been looking at a great page regarding the problem ( http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000646.htm ) and since it's happened so soon after a format I must say I'm a little worried that the HDD is corrupt. Saying that, I did mess around with Boot.ini to change the OS selection timeout change from 30 seconds to 3 seconds, so I'm going to rebuild that too :/