Help me troubleshoot? It turns on, but screen stays blank.

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dunerider5

New Member
I brought my tower into the garage today and blew all the dust out of it.

I put it back inside, hooked it up, and now I've got this problem. The computer turns on, but the screen just stays black. The fans spin, the mobo led's are in normal status, I'm not getting beep codes...

I removed my ram, graphics card, all peripherals, bios battery (temporarily). Nothing has changed.

Help, please?


What's also interesting is that the monitor is kind of in sleep state. When I unplug it from the tower, it turns on and tells me there's no signal. But as soon as I plug it back in, it goes back to it's sleep state (power light goes from green to yellow).
 
Unplug teh computer from the power, hold down the on button for 10 secs and remove the cmos battery for 20 minutes. Try again.
 
Compressed air.

I didn't get it too close (I think). I don't bother blowing out every last little spec.

The motherboard is only about 6 months old. The PSU is less than two years old.

I'm not really sure what else to do from here.
 
do you have another, desktop or laptop you can use to test the monitor, or alternatively another monitor you can use to test your desktop ?
 
Remove it from the case, benchtest with minimum hardware and if that works incrementally include more hardware.
 
I got it working. I'm not sure what fixed it, but it may have been re-seating the power cables.

Unfortunately, now I can't boot from my primary hard drive. It's recognized in the bios, but it won't boot from it. It seems to act like there is no OS installation on it.

The drive has two partitions, only one of which has the windows installation. Could there have been a problem with this since I removed the mobo battery? What could have happened?
 
Yes, the correct drive is selected to be booted from first.

I just tried to reinstall windows... here's what happened.

I'm running on my secondary hard drive. I can see my primary hard drive in My Computer. It's partitioned into one partition that has only the windows 7 installation files on it. The other partition (main partition) has the OS installed.

While running on this secondary hard drive, I ran the setup file and selected the main partition on the primary hard drive to install windows on.

Instead of doing that, it installed windows 7 on my secondary hard drive again.
 
It's not a boot order problem, because I can unplug the other hard drive and the same thing happens.

The "other issues" part is what I'm trying to figure out.

I wish I could try to repair or re-install with a windows CD, but I don't have a sata cd-rom to hook up to my mobo.
 
Are you using sata hdd's or IDE? If IDE, do you have them jumpered properly?

And what does having a SATA cdrom have to do with it?
 
I was mistaken, something very strange is happening.

I did actually re-install windows onto my primary hard drive. Not the secondary, as I had stated.

However, I still cannot boot directly from the primary hard drive. The only way to use it is to have the secondary hard drive plugged in, and select the windows installation on the primary hard drive at the boot screen.

I had renamed the original installation on the boot screen, and that has not appeared ever since I started having this problem. For some reason it just won't recognize the installation on my primary drive UNTIL I get to the boot screen by using the other hard drive.

My next attempt is going to be deleting the small partition. I'm pretty much out of ideas here.

Are you using sata hdd's or IDE? If IDE, do you have them jumpered properly?
Click to expand...
SATA

And what does having a SATA cdrom have to do with it?
Click to expand...
My new mobo only accepts SATA. No IDE connections. I don't have any optical drives to use with it.
 
Most likely the boot files are on the other drive and thats why it will only boot with the other drive plugged in. Remove the drive you won't be using from the system and just reinstall windows on the main drive. Then you can add the other drive back in and use it for data space.
 
That's exactly what I would like to do, but I'm unsure of how I can do it without an optical drive or a 4gb+flash drive. I don't have either.

I know, I suck.

At least for now I can use it by having the secondary drive plugged in.

Maybe I can turn another hard drive into a USB external drive and install windows from there using the "install windows from a thumb drive" tricks.
 
What motherboard or model of store bought computer do you have? It's much simpler to just get a cdrom drive.
 
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