[Winston_Wolf]

Greetings,

This is my first post out here and I've come for some help. I recently purchased a barebone kit and assembled it. I got everything together the way I wanted it, made sure BIOS was detecting all of my drives, and even monitored temperatures and opted to add an additional fan before proceeding with my Vista Business 32-bit install and everything was peachy.

Here's the rub... I pop in my Vista disk and fire up my brand new machine (first new machine I've had in almost six years and my first build). The disk loads up, but as the very first loading bar that starts the setup program completes, I'm hit with a stop error. So, just for the sake of knowing whether to blame my system or Vista, which I've never used thus far, I put in my old XP Pro CD and reboot. Again, everything goes fine, but when XP completes it's initialization of the setup program, I get a stop error again.

The new system uses an NVIDIA nForce 650i Ultra motherboard and a 3.0 Ghz Pentium D. Nothing fancy, but I'm a poor college kid and I only get the good deals on software. I did a little research on my own and I'm suspecting that the BIOS needs to be flashed and/or updated before I can install Windows. I've done a lot of hardware troubleshooting, but I've never flashed or updated a BIOS before. My board comes with a fancy program to accomplish this through Windows, but that obviously leaves me high and dry in this scenario. I checked the manufacurers site (XFX) and there is a recommended BIOS update (for use with their fancy-pants Windows utility, of course).

So, if anyone could:
a) confirm, agree, or disagree with my suspicion that a corrupt BIOS is the root of my problem.
and/or
b)walk me through the process of flashing/updating the BIOS on a brand new system without an OS.

I would appreciate any help offered and hope that I can give back to this community as well.

[Winston_Wolf]

Killdisked the hard drive on a suspicion that maybe some of Vista was loaded onto it when it went through the loading screen. Same result though... By the way, the setup screen for Vista loaded completely and without problems the very first time I booted with the DVD in. However I shut it down and did not start the installation because I wanted to add another fan before subjecting it to a long installation.

[Stoner]

It's always a good idea to test memory on a new computer, or newly added memory in an old one.
I use memtest 86, which you can launch from a bootable cd.

You can get a free download here:
http://www.memtest86.com/

[Winston_Wolf]

Thanks for the advice. The test showed that my RAM was bad. I guess I'll send it back since it's new.