OK... I built my comp w/ a iwill kd266 & amd tbird 1.1 ghz I recently opened to add a dvd drive and when I reconnected everything and turned it on, the screen remains blank...
512 mb SDRAM
80 gb hd
52x CD-Rom
16x DVD-Rom
48x CD-RW
ati radeon 7000 64 mb pci
soundblaster 5.1
belkin 10/100 ethernet

I know the monitor is on standby when I turn on the computer because the orange light comes on... its a compaq fs470... the green light comes on when I turn the monitor on... when I disconnect the monitor from the computer, it asks to check the video source... also the male part of the cable that connects to the computer seems to be missing 3 pins

HELP PLEASE!!

You are correct that there are missing pins on the VGA cable connection - that's normal. Your next troubleshooting step would be to try another known working monitor on your computer. If you get no video at all again then that would point to your video card (if that was the case you should hear some BIOS beeps at boot up). If the known good monitor works then you know that something is wrong with the previous monitor. There are not many hardware fixes to a bad monitor I'm afraid.

Good luck.

You... I figured out the monitoor works, but my mem was in the 3rd dimm so it wasn't displaying anything, but now I can start my comp and go to bios but I thin my hd is gone... bios won't detect it at all no matter what I do and I need to turn it on at least once just so I can extract my xp product key otherwise ill have to buy a new copy

Check your master/slave jumpering of the devices on the IDE interfaces. You have made a mistake there while installing the new DVD drive.
Oh, BTW, stop this silly SMS talk: < comp w/ a iwill kd266 & amd tbird 1.1 ghz >