Quite puzzled over blinking cursor

[AUfan]

Hopefully one or more of you guys can help me. My computer is a bit older, I put it together myself about three years ago. Gigabyte MB/ 939 pin 3700+ athlon/ Nvidia GS 256mb DDR3/ 2Gigs memory/ on-board sound, creative/ WD 320 gig HDD/ XP pro, fully updated... anyways... has run flawlessly but two things till now... power supply 6 mos. ago... replaced, no biggy... HDD went out 3-4 mos ago... was a Raptor, 74 gig... maybe bad power supply helped THAT out, not sure... everything has been fine till 2 days ago... checked e-mail that morning, got a shower... came back through after... BSOD... grrr... rebooted... it gets to "finding ide devices"... sees the hdd... blinks... and then a blank screen with blinking cursor at top left corner. Thought maybe power supply again, not powering hdd... installed new power supply... no change... OK, must be hdd crashed... changed hdd and figured fresh install... it wouldn't boot to the disk... it sees the cd rom in the "finding ide devices" area, and cd rom powers on and spools up, but still will not boot to disk... went into cmos and changed boot priority to boot to cd first... STILL wont boot to disk... I am assuming it is a hardware problem, but not sure what to check next, or exactly how to check it. It is an older machine and if it is going to cost me very much to repair, I can just build another. Any ideas and/or suggestions will be appreciated guys... thanks...

 

[adweston]

After attempting a BIOS reset to defaults, change the CPU. $50 says it's faulty. Same thing happened to me with an X2 4600 not long ago. Of course seeing as how that's as rare as a chicken with a wooden leg it was the last thing I checked... Grrrr.

 

[AUfan]

How exactly do you reset bios to default? pull battery for a bit?

 

[camo009]

When you start your computer it will say in the top right corner press f2 or whatever it says for setup, This could vary from the computer you have. Then you will see a blue screen with clearly shows your computers health and such. There should be a button saying, Reset to default settings or something along those lines.

 

[adweston]

Typically it's Del to get into a current AMIBIOS, reset to default is F9 once you're in.

 

[AUfan]

Thanks guys... I will try that tomorrow, if it doesn't work, I will check the local shops and try and find an older cpu... if not I duess e-bay, here I come... lol Thanks again, and I will keep everyone posted on what I find.