So as seeing that one of my friends was in need of a graphics card and ram to finish his first custom build, and I had been looking for an upgrade in those two areas as well I decided I would upgrade my rig, however there was also an awesome deal on a CPU cooler, and a couple other cooling solutions I figured I'd invest in to keep temps and the life of my hardware optimal

So everything had arrived from newegg and tigerdirect by this afternoon, I went through the long intricate process of removing my mobo, rearranging my cables and installing the new hardware, but when I was ready to boot is were things went awry and took a turn for the worst

First, Bios would load but would display a message like something along the lines of
"Error, improper boot device, please insert boot device or boot media and reboot
press any key to continue..."

Clearly that would be something wrong with the OS being detected on the hard drive. I tried restarting once just to make sure before going back, opening everything up and making sure the cables were plugged in. All was good but still got the error so I tried a new Sata cable, nothing changed.

Then finally after the power button with both the front and back case covers off it simply did not turn on, I have a steel desk, is it possible something came into contact and short circuited? I also didn't use an ESD strap but I did touch the case to ground myself and hadn't been in contact with anything likely to contact excess static electricity like blankets, fabric or anything </3

Also the motherboard light no longer lights up showing theres power (PSU issue?)

and before the computer stopped turning on entirely, my heatsink (it has an electrical component in the smart peltier cooler) would start beeping untill I unplugged it from the molex
What is happening?! Any troubleshooting tips or diagnosis'?

(*Indicates upgraded items)

The build is

Antec 1200

(5x120MM fans, 1x200MM)

Antec 1000W Modular, Active, 80+ Certified PSU 

Asrock 890FX Deluxe 3

AMD Phenom II X4 3.2GHZ

*HIS Radeon 6950

*Rosewill Card Reader

*Antec Spot Cooler

*ULTRA Chilltec Black CPU Cooler

*Masscool Slot cooler

1x Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB

1x Super Multi Lite-on DVD/RW

*1x Lite-on Blu-ray/DVD Burner combo

*4x4GB GSKILL 4GB 1600mhz

Keyboard and mouse are USB

Its plugged into an APC 600W UPS/Surge Protector

First off, thank you so much for anyone who's taken the time to read all of this and thanks ahead of time for any help or anything anyone has to offer. 

Note that it was also powered on from the beginning without the front side window being on, and right before problems worsened the back side was off as well (since I have cables routed through the back i thought maybe a folded sata cable was messing with things)

Also the hard drive was detected in Bios as well as both the CD and Bluray drive so I don't believe power was the issue initially 

Also upgrades were from:

Stock AMD Cpu Cooler

4x2GB Mushkin Blackline 1333mhz

Sapphire Radeon 6870

OK read your post pretty care fully and here are some suggestions, & possible solutions to try to troubleshoot this..

Leave the side panels off for now

Unplug the card reader completely ,remove 2 sticks of ram boot with one of the optical drives and new vid card and completely clear the mainboards bios .

get into the bios and check the settings for the ram sticks 2 @ 4GB.& check all the setting in your bios.&  check out Memtest on live cd or usb stick and run with the 2 mem sticks

if booting and getting ino OS system is  ok check out CPUz and some other HW Monitor for your  cpu & ram timings  fans and temps ...etc

.if all is good add the other 2 sticks of ram...make sure to unplug before adding ram ...might as well clean out and old vid drivers completely and install new ones for your vid card..if all good add the card reader last ..check the bios in boot too.

sounds mainly like a bios issue since you did not mention clearing and booting with just a few upgrades added can always add the slot coolers at any time

 If problems Check those memsticks with the mobo recommneds mainly DRAM voltage or post back with the exact model number. ,of the G.Skills

***you may have to enter the mem timings & DRAM volts manually in bios .but check anyways

can a always tidy up the cable management later after everything is booting and working properly.

& let us know how some of this goes :)

i would go through that process but it no longer turns on at all (total what the hell moment)

Did I blow my psu or something or is there a short or anything that would keep it from powering on? I mean like no power because theres not even a motherboard light on signaling a current through the mobo and the fan lights and fans dont spin up when iI hit the power button.
Did the motherboard blow, psu? what would cause that and any ideas for solutions other than buy a psu?

I have 1000w, seems like plenty of power to go around and i'm not running anything sli or crossfire that would need more than maybe 700w max 

First, use the jumper and reset the BIOS.

CLR CMOS1 is what the jumper says on it. It's on the bottom right of the motherboard. Move the jumper to pins 2 and 3 momentarily, then put them back to pins 1 and 2.

See if it turns on now.

If so,.......go into bios and go to the ~boot device~ screen. Set it to boot from the proper drive. If that doesn't work, Set the drive's read type to AHCI, Enhanced, or SATA. One of these will work. If you remember how it was set prior to this situation, set it that way. Then make it the boot device.

If you can post a photo of the board inside the case, a picture can say a thousand words and may help us to figure this out.

okay, i have two buttons on the motherboard that say CLR CMOS internally near the jumpers and on the IO panel, I pressed both of those, and moved the jumpers, still wouldn't turn on and alright could you remind me how to post a picture again?

I resent always having to be the bad guy, but this is Off Topic.  There is a sub-forum for Tech Support, and close to 40 others to organize forum content.  Same goes for your

New 3D, New graphics card?

thread.

OK, you changed the CPU cooler? Did you plug the new fan into power? (Newb questions that I HAVE to ask, no offense intended)

Is the secondary power on the top left of the board plugged in?

Are the memory sticks plugged all of the way in? (re-seat them now please)

Is the new video card seated completely into the socket? Are it's power plugs plugged in?

eunoia:

I resent always having to be the bad guy, but this is Off Topic

It's the off topic forum.

realneil:

eunoia:

I resent always having to be the bad guy, but this is Off Topic

It's the off topic forum.

Quoting the Hot Hardware moderator for posterity.

Alright so some magic happened but it was scary at the same time, as I was unplugging my mouse, keyboard and monitor to pull the tower out from under my desk to get better pictures... the computer turned on (I'd accidentally left the power plug in)

Okay if I am in some violation of the sites rules or posting in the wrong area could you direct me in where to go, or are there moderators or anything who could move this post into that category?

Yeah, the secondary power on the top left is in, the new fan is plugged in as well
Memory sticks are fully seated and things are a little bit complicated with the memory since their now below the humongous cpu cooler heatsink and unable to be removed without removing the cpu cooler, but I made sure they were 100% seated
New video card is seated with the latch slid in place and screwed into the rear slot, with its two 6pin power cables plugged in as well

No offense is taken, i'm knowledgeable but definitely a newb haha
Also I'm not sure if you read the earlier post but I accidentally got the computer to power on when I unplugged the mouse, keyboard, and display port adapters 

OSunday:

okay, i have two buttons on the motherboard that say CLR CMOS internally near the jumpers and on the IO panel, I pressed both of those, and moved the jumpers, still wouldn't turn on and alright could you remind me how to post a picture again?

sure hope you didnot power up with the jumpers in the clear position ..the manual is pretty clear on how to do this without -out bricking your board

look here

How to post your photos on HotHardware, a guide,......

OSunday:

Memory sticks are fully seated and things are a little bit complicated with the memory since their now below the humongous cpu cooler heatsink and unable to be removed without removing the cpu cooler, but I made sure they were 100% seated

I had similar symptoms on a computer the other day and it was memory related. Did you just push on them or did you actually pop the clips and push them back down? you should be able to still do this without fully removing the sticks.

No I didn't powerup the motherboard while the jumpers were set to clear, the computer will now boot to bios but not past there, the memory are fully seated and recognized in bios and so is the hard drive with the os installed that I would boot off of before

The strange thing is that the computer will only power on if the the mouse keyboard and monitors are Not plugged into it when earlier it would??
The computer stays on and shows bios with the keyboard functioning if I plug them in After its already powered on...

I'm gonna try and compress some photos so I can upload pics of the Bios screens and hardware in the case in a moment 

Here are some closeups of all the hardware

Motherboard Bios screen pics

Any chance something is grounding out? Also I assume you removed all the header wires when you pulled the motherboard. I would take them all out and re do them again.

Maybe, thats what i was thinking too

what do you think could be grounding and any ideas on how to fix it?
and by header wires do you mean the power cables and/or sata cables, and you think I should pretty much just unplug everything and plug it back in? 

OSunday:

Maybe, thats what i was thinking too

what do you think could be grounding and any ideas on how to fix it?
and by header wires do you mean the power cables and/or sata cables, and you think I should pretty much just unplug everything and plug it back in? 

Something under the motherboard possibly. Header wires are the wires for your front buttons on your case and also for like front panel audio/usb ports etc. I would one thing you may want to try is pulling that heatsink off and hooking your old one back up and see what happens. There is no definitive symptom pointing at any one thing in particular in this case. It is either going to be something really simple or strange . If you have another PSU it may be worth testing but I don't think it is your PSU.

Alright guys, I've isolated the problem to be a software problem.
After running memtest and windows memory diagnostic, unplugging and replugging everything back and and running through the bios to make sure everything was detected and recognized I concluded that somethings wrong with the boot table on my installation of W7, not sure how my hardware upgrade triggered this but I have had a problem in the past with it recognizing my windows installation after booting.

It's something with windows 7's boot manager, and I beleive the errors exist because when I initially built my computer I had a 30gb ssd that I intended on using for the OS alone, and having all programs and other things stored and run off of the HDD, but due to faulty drivers I ended up using JUST the HDD but in the process of getting to that point I went through a couple of windows installs across both hard drives, and I believe thats what is causing the problems with the recognizing the boot partitio (my terminology referring to booting up could be completely wrong) but I think leftover old installs of windows are being recognized or causing confusion.
I made sure the hard drive wasnt wiped or malfunctioning through the repair utility that let me browse the hard drive where I recognize all my data and system files from my windows installation

Just for informative purposes its Windows 7 Home-Premium 64-Bit

I googled my particular BIOS msg ('reboot and select proper boot device') and came across a solution that had you go into the windows repair utilities form the install or RE disk, go into bios and make sure the settings were set to have your hard drive with the OS set as active through a guid here

(http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/105541-startup-repair-run-3-separate-times.html?ltr=S)

after that was done, I started getting a 'BOOTMGR is missing, press ctrl+alt+delete to restart' message and plan on following the first step of the guide found on microsofts website to see if it solves anything

(http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-system/windows-7-bootmgr-is-missing-resolved-using-winre/8bb148bc-8035-4847-9696-888f7a0a9720)

If anyone is familiar with anything of the sort or has any tips I could use as much help as possible!
Thank you for the advice everyone has given me so far

when you are in the recovery console for your hd C:

type : fixmbr

fixes the Master Boott Record   reboot and see if that fixes it if not "

get into recovery console again

fixboot

fixmbr

>>reboot

let us know how this goes before considering a repair or restore or something else

Thanks for the tips rrplay, but the process I followed ended up getting everything to work

Thanks to everyone who helped!
Happy Holidays  

OSunday:

Thanks for the tips rrplay, but the process I followed ended up getting everything to work

Thanks to everyone who helped!
Happy Holidays  

Glad to hear it. I assume it boots now from a cold start with both the keyboard and mouse plugged in.