[ale] new hardware problems

[Geoffrey]

Well, got to pick out my father's day gift early.  It's been a pretty 
big headache ever since. :(  Here's the story:

New Asus a7n8x-e deluxe mb, new matched pair of ddr400 512m corsair 
memory,  AMD Sempron 3000+ (relatively new, but known to work in another 
mb). New WD Raptor 36g sata drive.  All assembled in a previously owned 
Lian-li case.

New bios in the mb, 1013 the latest.

Box begins to boot, but seems to cycle through a couple of reboots 
without me doing anything.  I say that because you see the monitor led 
go green, then you hear what appears to be a reboot and the led goes 
yellow, then green again.  Sometimes it will make it to the 'loading the 
OS' message, other times I never see anything on the monitor.

It will spontaenously reboot, even when sitting in the bios screen. 
I've been in the bios, when suddenly the box reboots.  It's not heat 
related as the mb has monitoring and when I view the temps, they're okay.

The mb manual is of little help as you're not sure what's good/bad. 
Start's by saying there are 4 memory slots (there are 3).  Then says you 
can arrange matching dual channel ddr400 sticks in [1,3], [2,3] or 
[1,2,3].  I've never seen matched sticks in threes...

It says you can use single-channel ddr400 one stick in any one of the 
slots.  I have tried this, with three different sticks of ddr400, still 
can not get a successful boot.

Any suggestions as to what this might be would be greatly appreciated. 
Bad mb or memory I guess, but I don't even want to consider swapping the 
board out.  I've got other ddr400 memory, but it's not 'paired.'  I've 
tried it as well, but no luck.  I've gotten as far as actually getting 
into the install when SuSE was loading the drive, but that suddenly 
rebooted as well.

I guess I mostly suspect the mb, but what a pita to have to replace this 
thing now. :(

-- 
Until later, Geoffrey (somewhere very close to that location known as 
"wit's end...")