As I have mentioned in another thread I upgraded my old system a bit. That meant that my "old" parts (meaning less than a year old) went to my husband. This is what is happening.

Among the upgrades was a change over to Windows 7 from XP. After I put it all together in his case, the disc for Windows 7 refused to load beyond the initial "loading Windows" boot screen--I eventually pulled the HD (a < 2 month old WD SATA) and inserted into MY PC to do a simple format in the hopes that would help.

It seemed to to a degree because eventually I was able to get 7 LOADED up; but it kept hanging up. I had to manually restart a few times, and it would pick up where it left off. It took me over an hour and a half to get Windows 7 installed, whereas on my machine it took me little more than 20 minutes.

At random points of restart it would either restart just fine, or it would hang on boot, and hitting the reset button would "un" hang it.

Eventually hubby took over and started to try to download some of his files from our backup WD My Essentials drive--and when he plugged it in to the front USB, the machine turned off.

NOW my WD Essentials drive (about six weeks old) is DEADER THAN A DOORNAIL. I checked to make sure I hadn't put the USB connections in wrong--and by check I mean I pulled them and put them into the other USB slot available on the motherboard--and the USB port connects fine. Honestly I don't know which came first, the chicken or the egg, on this one.

I made the mistake of walking away and leaving the machine on; when I came back a few minutes later it was off. I thought it was the standby mode that Windows 7 seems so fond of activating by default--but it would only come on when I hit power, not by mouse or keyboard touch.

Further, when power was PUSHED the monitor would not come on--not until after I physically unplugged it and plugged it back then. Then it failed to load and hung up again.

At the MOMENT I have power completely pulled so as to prevent any other shenanigans, and am staring at the guts of this thing trying to decide if I should pull it all apart again. I have no idea what the deal is, the only thing I did was move the components from one case to another, and add a different processor. Everything else is identical to the rig I was running. (And yes, I did have on a wrist strap to prevent static discharge.) I triple checked to make sure there were not any misplaced screw connectors under the board as well.

This is what we have:

GIGABYTE GA-P55M-UD2
Intel i3, stock heat-sink with AS5 thermal paste
2x2GB DDR3 RAM
500W Antec Basiq PSU
DVDRom x1
SATA drive x1
IDE drive x1
GEForce 8800

I have ALREADY reset BIOS to default though I haven't yet reset CMOS for the kicks and giggles factor. Any advice would be appreciated before I throw myself or this computer in the canal--whichever comes first.Your frustration is palpable and very understandable. As a general comment i think that given ALL the things that have been moved PLUS the attempt at upgrading the O/S there are too many variables as to where the issues are.This comment i find intriguing "DEADER THAN A DOORNAIL" in reference to your "new " HDD. What makes you so positive the drive is dead? It is too bad you did the hardware transfer and the O/S upgrade as it appears at the same time (before you had established that the hardware all functioned). Anyway what's done is done. How are you plugging in a SATA HDD into a USB port? My advice at this point would be to install the minimum hardware into your "new" case to get it to run then add things one at a time until a problem occurs then at least you would have a handle on the problem and could deal with it.Right now it is just too much to get a handle on. truenorthMy new external is deader than a doornail because it won't load up on any PC anymore; it's simply not recognized. Per WD website, that means it has failed and needs replaced. It was working fine until it was plugged into the "new" machine that then shut off. It now has an RMA in progress.

At this point I have narrowed it down to a motherboard issue. I pulled the whole thing apart AGAIN, and while in the process found that some of the Arctic Silver cleaning compound had somehow remained on the heat sink and fouled the paste (which I of course IMMEDIATELY re-cleaned and made triple sure was free of any detritus before re-seating the heat sink), it wasn't anything that was causing this malfunction.

I researched about "slow Windows 7 load and install" and found several things that could be the problem--first being the Floppy drive being enabled and causing the machine to stall on checking a drive that wasn't there (so I disabled it in BIOS per recommendation) and second that sometimes a stick of RAM needs to be removed during install. It helped, but not entirely.

The behavior it exhibited was one of a mainboard glitch. I finally threw in the towel and updated the BIOS, which I am always LOATHE to do; it went from a version 3 to a whopping version 11.

At this time the system is behaving in a stable fashion. My belief is that despite my precautions, when I transferred the board to a new case somehow it corrupted or simply glitched the BIOS, and the update solved the problem.

So are we having a party to celebrate this rejuvenation or do you still have issues you want help with?truenorthI like parties.