It's not the video card. I replaced my 800XL with a 9700 AIW Pro and no difference.

I have 2 1GB sticks of PC3200 RAM in the machine. I took both out and tried booting the machine with each stick separately. The machine doesn't act any differently with only stick #1, but when I only use stick #2 the machine beeps. I'm guessing that stick #2 is bad, so I took it out. The machine still won't boot though with stick #1.

My machine isn't overclocked at all. It is a Neo Platinum 2 mobo with an Athlon X2 4200 CPU.

My LCD monitor doesn't come on until WinXP Pro has loaded, and I don't see anything before that point. So, I'm going to connect an old CRT monitor to the machine so I can watch what (if any) messages are shown on the screen during the boot process. Maybe that will help. If I still think it's the hard drive, I'm going to buy one at the local WalMart. That way, I'll be able to return it after I diagnose the problem.



> > My desktop went tits up today and I'm trying to figure out what went bad.
> >
> > I was watching a flash video when the system turned itself off and rebooted.
> > Ever since it hasn't worked right. The computer will turn on (fans come on,
> the
> > system beeps, the HD drive light flickers a few times), but it won't boot and
> my
> > LCD screen keeps saying "No Signal". I tried swapping out the graphics card,
> > but that didn't seem to make any difference.
> >
> > Could it be the hard drive?
>
> Well, I suppose there could be a small chance. More likely it's something with
> the motherboard, processor, or possibly memory. It might've taken a shot while
> you were away.
>
> My box started acting up like this occasionally after I dropped a Barton into it
> at its normal clockspeed. 98% of the time, it's OK. Occasionally it won't POST
> (just like yours is doing), but most of the time a reset will snap it out of
> it's fugue. Once every month or so it'll stay comatose for a half-hour.
> Reboots, all bets are off. I have to leave it off for a while before it'll come
> back. Once in a while (usually after some hardware or BIOS change or if I'm not
> careful and hibernate or "sleep" my computer instead of regular shutdown) it'll
> hang at the DMI Pool Update just before passing to the bootloader.
>
> Pretty much all these problems go away if I underclock my processor, but I
> didn't buy a Barton so I could run it at T-bird speeds.
>
> Basically, see if you can't get it to boot again. If you can, slow your
> processor down and see if the problems don't go away. If you can't, pull the
> boot drive and see if it won't boot on a similar system (at least that way
> you'll know whether the drive is bad).
>