project: Server

Problem 1: Monitor will not detect motherboard.
Problem 2: DVD drive will turn on only if the IDE cable is not plugged in.

Possible solutions:
1a. The four pin power cord is not drawing sufficient power for the required eight pin.
2a. The drive isn't labeled as slave.

Research: After talking with a couple of other technicians I found that my proposed solutions were inocrrect and that the issue probably dealed with my power supply in form or another. After attempting to to get the mother board to boot up with just one stick of ram and just the processor plugged plugged in, the power would have been easily been sufficient, but the it still didn't boot.

Power supplies have an option on running on 115 Volts or 230 Volts. The standard for U.S. appliances is 115V.

Result: I flipped the switch to 115 Volts and the computer booted up just right.
I have a server with three 500GB SATA HDDs, an AMD x5200 Athalon processor, two 2GB sticks of DDR2 RAM, one 40GB IDE HDD, and one DVD drive.

My next step is to install Microsoft Server 2003 as the OS on the 40GB IDE HDD.

Reflecting: A simple check as to the U.S. voltage standard and my power supply's state as to whether the switch needed to flipped or not , would have saved much time.