hey, recently bought my first build and construction was successfull.

booted for the first time and no problems, insterted vista and installed it

when the computer rebooted the monitor displayed "no signal" and went to standby.

this is all that happens after many restarts, reconnection of hardware.

any ideas where to begin to fix?

machine specs are...

• black cube case with side window - with 650W PSU
  
• gigabyte ga-MA69VM-S2 690V socket AM2 onboard VGA 8 channel audio matx motherboard
  
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ socket AM2 retail boxed processor
  
• Asus EN8500GT silent magic edition 512MB DDR2 128bit VGA DVI PCI-E graphics card
  
• creative sound blaster audigy SE 7.1 OEM pci soundcard
  
• LiteOn 20X sata dvd±rw/ram + nero - retail
  
• 180gb hdd
  
• 1gb kingston ram

any help/ideas apprecited. Dom.

Duane in Japan

Mine was a bad video card. Of course, check your board connection first and wire connection if you have one.

diyperson

If you do not get the post messages or the initial display when you boot your PC, then it is either a loose connection or a bad display card.

The other question would be that how do you know if the system is actually booting up. Sometimes it starts and does not go any further if the RAM/CPU is an issue.

Try the following:
a) Remove you hard drive connection and try booting the PC. You should still be able to see the display without the hard-disk. It will complain about it which is fine.
b) Try changing VGA card and see if you get a display
c) If that does not work, try removing one of the RAM chips if you have two installed and if it does not work try removing the other one.

It it still does not work, possibly a bad Motherboard or CPU.

Hope this helps !

If you still have problems, the only issue could be

retsoksirhc

Usually if there is a problem with the RAM or CPU, the light on the CD drive will flash on and off too. It looks like it's starting up, and the fans spin, but it just doesn't do anything else. I'm not sure if it does that with a bad video card...but I know that the video bios is initialized early in the boot process, so you shuold see a screen with information about the video card before the POST screen shows up.

If you get past the POST (where it either shows a logo, or tells you what kind of hardware you have), and then it goes to no signal, it probably can't support the video mode windows is trying to use. If you press F8 a few times just when the POST screen vanishes, you shuold get thewindows boot menu....try booting to VGA SAVE mode or VGA mode (somthing like that) because it loads a standard video driver with low resolution and color settings. If not, try safe mode too.

Flytrap

Interesting replies but they all make too many assumptions. Is there an onboard speaker or can a speaker be plugged into the board? If so, BIOS beep codes are your friend.

Remove everything from the board, unplug ATA cables, cards and memory. The board should just be the CPU with the power supply plugged in.

Power up, a single beep means "where the hell is my CPU". Usually. Sometimes the beep codes are in the motherboard manual. If you get one beep try removing and reseating the CPU. Remember to use new thermal paste. If it still gives 1 beep or none borrow a PSU that works and try this.

Two beeps means "here the hell is my memory". If you get this power down and replace the memory, one at a time. If it starts now with 3 beeps it means "where the hell is my video".

By now you should have some idea of what is wrong.

Sometimes finding the problem is just a matter of eliminating the knowns to find the unknown.

Soundmanc

Hhmmm, here's a thought. I know it usually defaults to the video card that is plugged in, but what if there is a conflict between the PCI-E card and the onboard video?

Plug the monitor cable into the onboard, or the other video jack and see what happens.

If this gets into windows, or at least to the place where you can get into safe mode, or the Vista equivalent, then check for conflicts between the 2 cards, or check to see which one is set as default.