help, please, before i go mad

Almost crying with rage.

Just reinstalled Vista 3 times this evening. It totally borked overnight for unknown reasons. First install froze. Second, I ran RWipe and Clean to get rid of windows.old and it deleted c:\users. No idea why.

Third I got cannot find bootmgr. I figured this was because C was not connected to Sata 1, so I took out the sata cables, swapped them around, and rebooted. No display. Nothing at all. Not even bios. Nothing. BUT in the background windows booted up fine, I could hear it logging on.

I may have nudged the northbridge cooler when I swapped the sata cables around. I tried disconnecting the 8800gt power supply to see if that did anything: yes, the PC squealed at me, so power is getting through the graphics card. All fans are spinning up. HDs are ticking over. Keyboard function lights light up when I press power but still... no display. At all. Have checked all cables are secure, monitor is turned on (yes, checked that). Nothing.

Any thoughts?

That squeeling happens when a 8800gt doesn't have the extra power plugged in, it's got a small speaker on it.

Sounds really odd, have you tried clearing the CMOS? off hand it could be the motherboard.

How... um... how do I clear Cmos?

I feel it's mobo too. for some reason I really hope it's not my graphics card. Don't kwnow why as if either is borked, it's gonna cost to replace, and if it's the mobo, getting a replacement a8n sli deluxe isn't cheap.

Look in the motherboard manual there should be a jumper on it some ware.
you need to remove the power cable from your psu, move the jumper, (from pin1+2 to 2+3 or visversa) leave it for 5min
then move the jumper back and repower, this will reset your bios to default settings btw

Cheers, chief. I went to bed after my post. Just got up and tried it again in case my wife's preferred technique of "try it in the morning and it'll work" was successful.

It was not, BUT i have noticed that the CPU fan spins up, then spins back down again.

That, to me, indicates borked board. It is also now failing to boot all the way up as I cannot hear any windows log on noises.

Methinx I shall be calling the nice people at Scan today to upgrade to a q6600.

Hi,read were a few PC's when switched off at the back do that(mine does).Turn on at back,press front button,PC kicks up fans etc,then stops,press again & system boots etc.


Cheers BOB

Hi
Have you got onboard graphics or anouther graphics card to check it. Failing that you could try the old trick of first principles, unplug everything, including all datacables and power make sure there is power in the graphics card and the board. then see what happends.

dave

You could try testing the memory bad memory has caused dodgy installs for me in the past
(ISO images suitable for creating a bootable Memtest86 CD-ROM) from
http://www.memtest86.com/download.html