KT6 Delta - boots, RAID & ethernet start, crashes

Hey everyone. =)

I have an Athlon XP 2500+ in a MSI KT6 Delta Motherboard. Two 512 MB sticks of PC2700 RAM, and a kind of old GeForce 2 Ultra, salvaged from an old computer. This whole setup is new and has technically never run before.

So, when I start it up, what happens is everything turns on, the screen gets the MSI logo splashed across it. The VIA SATA raid thing pops up, determines I have no devices, and then the Ethernet tries to start. Broadcom or something or other. It tells me there's a media device error, then that it is exitting the PXE ROM. Then the computer promptly crashes, and the power button won't revive it -- I have to turn the power supply on and off in order to get it to function again.

I've tried taking off everything except the processor, MB, RAM, and videocard, and I still have the same error. I've varied the RAM between different slots, and using only one stick at once in each of the slots, all to no effect.

So... does anyone have any ideas?

Okay, so I figured out that if I push F2 really really fast, I can get the system into BIOS before it tries to do SATA and Ethernet initialization. The difficulty is, it shuts itself off anyway.

As near as I can figure, no matter what I do, after about 3-5 seconds, the computer turns itself off, regardless of what it's doing. It's done it in BIOS, and I actually hooked the Ethernet cable up to it and it did it in the middle of resolving DHCP. So... um... any ideas?

Do you have a FAN plugged into the 3-pin header on the motherboard marked "CPU Fan" or something to that effect?

What may be happening is, your motherboard has a setting to shut down if a CPU fan is not present. The only way that it knows that is if you are using the 3-pin header specifically marked for it.

Try that....

If it ain't that, test it with a different PSU.

Let us know.