BIOS hangs on POST screen - ATI Xpress 200P motherboard

Hot-swapping and Boot-Block flash & Boot block flash and floppy support
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bnice
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My PC has started hanging on the BIOS post screen. It gets as far as recognising the AMD CPU. No memory checking and, I think, one or more of the hard disks make a "clicking" noise. Keyboard and CD-ROM lights flash and then silence and a frozen bios post screen.

I've recently added an extra hard disk via a rack. It now has a total of 4 hard disks - one housed in an internal rack in a 5 1/4 drive bay.

The PC was working fine until I was forced to do a hard reset. The PC had frozen once before when it had 3 internal disks and no rack but for no reason it did bootup again eventually after many attempts.

I've now removed the hard disk in the rack but the rack is still fitted but this has had no effect. Also, I've reset the motherboard via its jumper and removed its battery but again the bois is still 'stuck'.

What should I try next?
ajzchips
El cheapo dude
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Location: Madrid, Spain

Seen that... possibly faulty PSU or swollen onboard capacitors...
bnice
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Joined: Tue Feb 14, 2006 3:22 pm

I've tried unplugging some of the hard disks and USB devices and this fixed the hanging. Maybe too much power needed in one go from the PSU, anyone agree?

Unfortunately, because of the BIOS reset, I think, the PC won't boot from the system hard disk but only the Windows XP CDROM even though the hard disk is the first boot device. Also it thinks the disks are SCSI in the hard disk priority screen of the BIOS but they are SATA. During the IDE device detection it doesn't find any of the hard disks just the CDROM. It also now prompts me to start up the RAID utility which is never used to before I reset the BIOS. Any pointers please?
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