Computer problem – we’re stumped

[gecko]

My son has a PC he built himself from components purchased over the web. Out of the blue, he’s having trouble with his system booting up. Note – system has worked fine for over a year.

PROBLEM
When starting the system the machine proceeds normally through post and does one of the following…screen turns black and the monitor says, “no signal” or he makes it to the Windows logo screen, then the screen goes black.

SOLUTIONS WE”VE TRIED
We swapped video cards with another machine to see if that’s the issue, no dice. We hooked up a spare hard drive and experienced the same issues. We’ve reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled the operating system (Windows XP Professional). Still not fixed.

Does anyone have any idea what is going on here…? Our sense is we may have a problem with the power supply. My son indicates he can switch the power supply off at the source and when attempting solutions he will get farther along. However, no “fix” seems to hold.

 

[Orange&White]

Are there two monitors?or two monitor connections?

It seems like what happened is that the monitor settings have been changed and that the computer is firing up but the primary monitor screen is not visible on the actual monitor screen. Meaning, its off to the side of the screen. This happened to me a few weeks ago on my dual monitor setup.

 

[gecko]

Thanks OW...we had already eliminated that one. We think we've eliminated driver conflicts as well.

Add'l issue just brought to my attention...the fan to the video card is not spinning when this issue arises.

 

[zork]

Can you boot straight to the bios?(aka: "F2 to enter system setup" <for example> ) If not, unplug the hard drive and attempt to boot to the bios to take software out of the picture. Do it 2 or 3 times to be sure.

The next thing to maybe try is to boot to a bootable diskette and do basic dos commands. Then if that works you can try and boot to the same disk and access the hdd and look around on the root directory, etc. (of course you would have to plug your hard drive in and reboot to the disk to get this last step) This might require you to temporarily change your boot sequence to cd or Floppy booting first while you are troubleshooting.

Finally if there is a nasty virus on your hard drive that is causing it to make the machine not bootable with it plugged in(that might have stayed on the master boot record somehow even after re-install), and it being the bootable device, you will have to attempt to clean it with a diskette or cd bootable anti-virus program. I am sure they still exist but don't know what to tell you specifically about the particular A-V makers these days in terms of extreme rescue or cleaning of a hdd when you can't even boot to safe mode of windows.

Find a known good and work your way up from there is the method my above approach attempts to use. Verify hardware as being good as you build up to see if it is a software or virus problem. This given the extreme no-boot situation you are faced with. Good luck.

 

[TexasOwnzYou]

are you overclocking anything (the RAM maybe?)

 

[gecko]

No not overclocking anything on the computer. I managed to boot the computer and I'm typing on it right now. I went into the bios and loaded basic defaults and then it booted up. I don't think it is fixed because usually when the computer is off for more then 20 minutes I will have this probelm all over again. I've also noticed whenever I change anything in the bios it usually boots up...

 

[gsoda3]

maybe new mobo time?

 

[gecko]

After messing around with the bios and the motherboard I was able to get it to boot several times sucesfully without any problems. I will now for sure by tomorrow if it is really working.
One more question. I'm missing the microsoft system mang. bios driver. The mssmbios.sys file is located in the correct folder, but windows won't recognize it. Does anyone know what this driver does?

 

[Ignatius]

Out of curiosity, did the problem start upon updating the video card driver? I had what sounds like a similar problem on an ATI card a couple of years ago; I ignored the advice I had always heard, which was that if your video is working fine, DO NOT upgrade the drivers just for the sake of keeping them updated...

 

[plimon]

I had a similar problem with a Win2K machine. I booted the machine into safe mode where you can see the drivers as they get loaded. I noticed that the machine would hang while loading the AGP bus driver. So I installed a PCI video card and disabled AGP in the BIOS. That fixed it. This machine did not require to have fast graphics, so going to the PCI bus was OK.