Windows 7: Trying to revive old AMD machine

Have an old AMD "gamer" here that is in reasonable state and worth making up as a tester.

Generic case with large ans in and out - board is a Gigabyte K8NF9 Ultra (dual BIOS) that I have stuck 4GB DDR 333 RAM into plus a cloned XP 32bit IDE drive.

Now I get the post and it goes to this and the the BIOS setup is showing me this.

Have tried booting form the drive and optical with Ubuntu and XP plus changed the IDE leads.

Has this board had it or am I doing something wrong. (paper clips on northbridge for cooling -- hot)

I assume both the HD and optical driver are IDE. If so are both at the end of their respective cables (looks like two IDE cables in there) and both jumpered correctly?

its telling you, you have no hard drive, so maybe the IDE drive has had it, have you another, or a spare SATA drive laying around?

Thanks fellas Yes they are both IDE and yes the drive is on master and I have tried a second drive - mastered and I have a couple of old SATA drives lying around although I don't know what is on them but worth a try will get back.

are you able to boot from a usb ? might try ubuntu that way
just to see if you get anywhere with the board .

Ok mate I'll download it to a stick and see what happens am setting up the SATA first if that doesn't work then I might just call it a day and get another AMD or Intel board - it's only for testing on anyway.

Maybe the chipset's been fried as I only picked it up from a recycle centre for parts to make up machines for kids who can't afford to buy new.

No have tried just about everything now I did notice at start up it mentioned something about single channel 64bit so tried a cloned drive form my 64bit machine but still no go.

Did you try resetting the BIOS to default values?

I would've thought that if the IDE connector didn't work, the SATA ports would.

The single-channel 64bit message you saw almost certainly refers to the RAM running in single-channel rather than dual-channel mode (which would be 128bit). Either the mobo doesn't have dual-channel support, the RAM modules are woefully mismatched or not all of them are recognized due to some problem.

I don't quite get what you mean by the dual and single channel modes though the board specs allow for single or dual core CPU's if that is what you mean. Maybe the cores' had it!

Actually Corazon the sticks (4) are all identical Kingston KVR333X64C25/1G and I tried it with just two sticks in - it's just not recognising anything.

Yes I tried defaulting the BIOS and even taking the battery out for a while - am going to take it out while I am at work and give it chance to really default.

The SATA's I tried some old ones and new ones. I think the board is past it's use by date which is a shame as it would have made a really nice second tester. All the same I hate it beating me!

John dual Channel refers to the memory platform. Multi-channel memory architecture - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
To get the SATA drive to work you'll need to go into BIOS and enable the SATA controllers on the board first. Set them to AHCI if you have the option.