Gah! - PC turns on, but no monitor signal!

My main pc was working completely fine the other day - I was happily playing counterstrike, working on coursework, and all that. No problem, man! (to quote John Candy in Cool Runnings).

However, I turned it off yesterday in order to reinstall a (Sony) CDRW that I'd been using to reinstall an OS on my webserver. As I turned it off, I realised that I'd clicked restart instead of Shut down. So (stupidly!), I turned off the machine straight after it rebooted.

I unplugged the psu cable, plugged the ide/power cables in and screwed the cdrw in securely - everything in as you normally do when installing a CDRW. When I was ready to turn the pc back on, I replugged the psu cables in, turned it on at the back, and switched the pc on.

The computer turns on fine - fans are moving, hdd is being accessed, motherboard lights are on, as are keyboard and mouse optical lights. However, the monitor stays on standby - ie, recieving no signal.

So, I turned the pc off (again :/), and unplugged the cdrw (which was working perfectly with the server), just to check whether it was what was causing the problem. It wasn't.

I've reset the cmos, re-seated the graphics card, re-plugged the ide cables, ram, cmos jumper, vga cable, mouse cable, keyboard cable. I've even unplugged the kvm switch, and tried booting without it (so that the monitor/keyboard/mouse are plugged directly into the machine). I've tried the other vga out plug on the back of the graphics card (using a dvi to vga converter).

No cigar, though.

Helllllppp... the missus keeps bugging me, cause she wants to play Age of Empires!

My setup is:

NF7-S
XP1700 (not overclocked)
Thermaltake 420W
ATi Radeon 9600
Corsair TwinX XMS 3200 512MB
Sony CDRW
Pioneer Slot DVD
Maxtor DMax9 120GB

When you reset cmos did you remove the power cable?
have you tried booting whilst holding the Insert key down?

Don't suppose that you have a spare gfx card to hand?

try taking the memory out, and then booting, you should get a beep code from the bios, a long beep IIRC, then replace it, same with the graphics card, but you get a code like "beee beeep beeep beee beeep beeep"... remove anything you don't need to POST from your system, leave just the bare essentials: CPU (obv), Memory, Video Card, Keyboard. If you post with this, put things back in one at a time and test which component is causing the problems.

If the problem still persists, try a single memory module, try a different graphics card, try a different CPU, as it could be any one of those that is causing your problems.

Thanks for the replies, chaps... but the bleeding thing decided to work all of a sudden. I just installed a little pc speaker to see if there were any error beeps - and whilst I had my head under the desk, I hear monitor activity when I turn the thing on.

Very strange.. I have no idea what was wrong.. as it was doing the same when I left it yesterday. Completely baffled.

Perhaps the Computer fairies came during the night, or something...

or maybe your gfx is going down

it makes sence overheating.......boom, no display

waits...gfx cools

works !


maybe the fans blown or something?

Nah, it's fine.. fan is working well, and I'd tried to boot up from cold boot (eg giving it a night or two of off time), and it still didn't work.

Decent airflow in my case anyway, so I doubt that'd be the problem. Unless I'm mistaken, anyway :/