Reformatting... need help!

[bigmike]

OK, so I made sure my BIOS was booting from CDROM and first priority, and then HDD.

I put the Windows XP Pro CD in and the little windows pop-up screen came up and I exited that and shut down my computer.

I turn my computer back on and I cannot get ANYTHING on my monitor.

I have two slots on the back of my eVGA 6800 PCI-E card... I have tried every possible variation i could possibly do with the two slots with three different monitors. I also took care of the obvious stuff and made sure my card was tightly fastened in my PCI-E slot and things like that.

Now, I could not a a screen for the life of me so next time I turned my computer on, took OUT the windows XP disk, and turned off my comp.

Turned it back on this time without anything in the CD ROM and STILL nothing on any screen.

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

EDIT: I have no monitor interface on my motherboard (MSI n-force 4)

 

[zerocoolzz66]

Have you tired exchanging your harddrive out?

 

[bigmike]

Have you tired exchanging your harddrive out?

Ehh... I dont have another one. I was just planning on reformatting my current one which im sure I can do if I could just get something on my monitor.

Still a blank screen...

 

[bigmike]

OK... i winded up taking battery of mobo out and putting it back in.

So I am back to normal like it was before i even tried reformatting.

But now, how could i reformat without running into this problem again?

 

[tall_tiger]

I had this problem once and the culprit causing the problem was the memory not being fully seated in the slots.

If you have disconnected your video cable, inspect it thoroughly for a "bent pin" inside the connector or possibly a broken pin.

Just another thing or two if you haven't tried them

 

[tall_tiger]

Another possibility is if you have installed the video card or moved the system, a card could have moved a bit in the slot and caused a short in the board. Check the other devices to see that they are running, the cooling fan, hard drive powering up, etc. Retrace any steps that might have been made with respect to connecting or disconnecting anything. Sometimes a power connector that has fallen off causes the system to hang.
If the circuitry inside the hard drive may be causing a controller to hang, disconnect the IDE connector from the M/B and then reconnect it.
I fixed a system last week that had a defective primary IDE controller.
I disabled it and switched the connector to the secondary controller.
Also boot your system and get into the selective startup mode (F8).
See if you can select an option to start the system in standard VGA mode (640 x 480). That will get the video reestablished and then you can reset it as needed.