Boot problems

Can you give me some advice please. I have a fairly old pc tower which is a spare, so I thought I'd use it as a practice to learn building. I have installed a Microstar MS-6339 motherboard with P4 processor. I have also installed a 400w PSU. Now on boot up the monitor shows the initial logo then at the bottom...Pres F2 to enter setup. The wording then changes to entering setup.then it hangs. So bootup appears to be correct up to that point. There is no buzzer sounding although I know the buzzer works. Please bear in mind that I am not a genius although I can chew gum and walk at the same time. I would appreciate any comments thank you.

i've had this a few times,its a fail safe.the bios sees that there are incorrect settings,more than likely your cpu settings.so you need to get into the bios to set them and any other,so press F2 at start up to enter bios. you won't get a beep as it has'nt passed bios test

Thanks waggers but it's when I press f2 it then states at the bottom of the screen 'entering set-up....it's then that it appears to freeze. I cleared cmos by JBAT 1 the 3 pins jumper being 1 & 2, placing on 2 & 3, then back to original position. How can I get into Bios when it freezes before getting there. Is this where flashing the bios can be done?

i had this once with an asus board,kept trying to boot into bios and failing.i found that one of the memory sticks was faulty,it had 2,so i just removed 1 at a time and tried and it then booted up on 2nd stick ok. so give that a try,also double check everything is pushed fully in

Thanks, I shall give that a try. The board has two memory chips in plus two blanks I also have one spare chip. Help in learning this way is better in some ways because you can draw on other peoples experiences where a dvd instruction disk will only tell you the run of the mill...how it should be, a bit like the highway code and driving. Thanks again for that.

your welcome, it could also be a memory bank on the mobo thats duff, i've had that as well,so try all slots

I tried all memory slots waggers but it still does the same routine. Shall I set fire to the mother board?

sorry in delay in replying

what you need to do now then is to disconnect everything from the motherboard, harddrive,cd/dvd drives , floppy. then try starting it up and see if it will go into bios, if not then it's more than likely a duff mobo