First of all: I'm trying to install windows 7, but I'll do this one problem at a time; my bios needs to be fixed first.
A little background: I downloaded and burned an image (from my MSDNAA account at school, not illegally) of Windows 7 Professional. The first 3 times I ran setup, it stopped at the "Setup is starting..." screen. I looked this up online, and saw a proposed solution was to change the sata setting from Native IDE to SATA>AHCI. I tried doing this, after looking up what this means.
The bios now hangs immediately on boot without even getting to POST, without sounding any beeps at all. The monitor says no signal, whether I plug it into the video card or onboard. If I reset the bios (by shorting the pins on the mobo), it works just fine--on the first subsequent boot. I can't even change the date and time without it breaking.
This is a home-built computer, about 6-7 years old. Hardware info is below.
Hardware information:
Motherboard model: Gigabyte GA-MA69VM-S2
CPU model: AMD Athlon 64 FX-37
More information on my hardware can be found
here; this is a VERY old report, but the graphics card and added RAM are the only internal hardware changes. I've found out after a few more tries that I
can actually get to windows setup if I wait a long time; it just takes about 5 minutes to finish loading. (upgrade assistant says it should work fine, so I'm assuming its a hardware issue). I do plan on getting a new motherboard and cpu relatively in the next year or so, but I would prefer to fix this problem.
Notes and repeats from irc:
This is not a laptop, it is a desktop computer.
It works fine on the first boot after resetting the bios, but once its shut down/restarted, it wont boot again until I reset the bios again.