DMI error on new machine

Last night I put together a P4 2.4 on a Soyo Dragon Light board with 512mb DDR400 ram. At first boot, I got to the point of accepting the MS agreement (F8) but it the keystroke was not recognized (though page up and down were). I did see that it was booting as a 1.8ghz.

At reboot, I got the following error (and did not see the first part of the screen): CMOS CHEKSUM ERROR - DEFAULTS LOADED
Warning: CPU has been changed or CPU ratio changed fail.
Please reenter CPU setting in CMOS/remember to save change.

OK, I do that, go to 133mhz clock and 18 multiplier, reboot and it shows 2.4ghz, BUT, I get to the line 'verifying DMI pool data' and it hangs. I have jumper-cleared the BIOS, gone to failsafe defaults, tried the RAM clock at both 133 and 200, just in case it was acting fishy. Only when flashing the RAM to I get back to my original situation, but after running through CMOS setup, or continuing, I hang at the DMI. The BIOS does correctly identfy the HD (Maxtor 80gb/133/mb cache) and the RAM checks fine. My next step will be to double check all connections for HD, then perhaps disconnect HD if that does not work and try booting from bootable floppy.

Any thoughts or suggestions at this point? Thanks!
Art

 

Take everything out of the machine, except video and floppy, disable onboard LAN, sound, USB, NIC, modem IRQ, whatever, and see if you can get a successful post.
Add the hard drive, try again.
If it's working, install Windows now, and add devices one at a time later.

 

Thank you for the reply. I tried something similar using bootable floppy, and removing pieces of hardware, starting with the drive. The problem turned out to be a bad hard drive. I had no problems with a bootable floppy; then pulled old HD from her old PC and was able to boot/run...so off to the store, and it's up and running.

I may have caused it...was beginning the OS install and came to place to hit F8. Did not realize one had to enable function keys on the Logitech keyboard so brought the power down. I imagine there may be corrupt files on it; did not think to bring to my house and reformat it. However, paid less money for 120gb Maxtor ATA133 than I had for 80gb Maxtor ATA133, so it worked out in the end.

Thanks!

 

Possibly too early for a bad battery, but worth a try.

The manual for that board indicates only marginal support for DDR400. It says there is no standard and that only DDR400 from particular manufacturers will work, and to try upgrading the BIOS as soon as one comes out. If you have any 333 available, try it.

Use the Soyo Combo Feature to quickly set up the BIOS with parameters that are sure to be compatible with one another.

Be sure the RAM is non-ECC and unbuffered, set at 2.5 volts.

The Soyo site also suggests that if, using a P4 and with the clock at 133, you get an incorrect CPU speed, a BIOS update is required.

 

I type too slowly .

Glad you got it going.

 

Ah, the joys of installing things with non-standard peripherals.
I ALWAYS carry a spare HD, video card, PS2 keyboard and mouse around. Invariably the BIOS doesn't natively support USB stuff, until windows is installed, so having PS2 is the only way to get anything done at first.
Good deal on the 120 too!