I just built a new system and am faced with a problem of the system not booting. I press the power button, and the only thing that happens is the CPU fan starts to spin (no beep, no video output and no BIOS screen). I went through this yesterday, to the point where I had disconnected everything from the motherboard, except the PSU and CPU, and RAM. I was pretty sure it was a motherboard issue so I took it back today and replaced it (with another of the same model). Tonight, I have the same problem: only the CPU fan spins. I even swapped in an old power supply (one that was known to work well), in case the new one was possibly causing a problem, but that didn't make a difference.
The only thing unusual about this system is that the motherboard only has SATA connectors and the harddrives and DVD drives are IDE and are connected to the motherboard via an IDE-to-SATA adapter expansion card. The guy at the shop was certain I'd be able to boot off the IDE harddrives using this card, but even with the card removed from the system, I still can't get the motherboard to post (it should beep and complain about not being able to detect any harddrives, right?).
I'm not sure what diagnostic step to take next, before deciding what part to take back, if any (I hope it's not necessary). Any suggestions?
If it helps, the motherboard is a GA-A75M-S2V, CPU is AMD A4-3400