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?