Ok, hopefully somebody out there can help me out:

This is a little long but I want to give you all the info I can-

My Dad has a computer that’s a few years old, about a month ago it stopped turning on so he went and bought a new power supply and installed it. Now it came on but wouldn’t display anything so he thought bad hard-drive. He then told me I could try and salvage it.

I went and got a new HD and plugged it in, turned everything on and…nothing. The system turns on, all fans are on and power is being delivered to everything. The problem is the monitor isn’t receiving a signal. The monitor isn’t the problem as I have tried it on another computer and it was fine. I also tried a different monitor on the “non-working” computer with the same results. The monitor will say it has no signal when it isn’t plugged in to anything, then if it gets plugged into the computer it goes into ‘sleep’ mode like it does when it is plugged in to a computer that is turned off, even though the computer is on. I have tried plugging the monitor into both the jack that is part of the motherboard and into a separate video card and gotten the same results.

I tried plugging the old HD into a different computer and it’s definitely is fried – it can’t even sort of boot-up. I also tried plugging a definitely working HD into my dad’s computer and still had the same problem so, it isn’t the new HD that is the problem.

I’ve successfully built several computers from scratch so I’m not exactly a computer ‘beginner’ but I am stumped here. One thing I think is possible is that when the old power supply stopped working or somehow got fried or overloaded or whatever—that it fried other things that it was plugged into including the old HD and some components of the mother board, including whatever delivers a signal to the monitor.

What do you think? Any ideas?

-Blake

Well, the only thing I can think of right off the bat is that you should try resetting the BIOS (either by changing the right jumper, or by pulling out the CMOS battery, or whatever religious ritual your brand of motherboard requires, such as sacrificing a chicken on the keyboard), because it sounds like you've got a problem with one of the busses (e.g. the PCI bus, the AGP bus, the Chicago-bound Bus, or whatever). It may only be a software problem, which you might be able to get rid of by resetting the BIOS; but if your computer still displays the same vital signs as an ashtray, then you've got a more serious problem on your hands. Post back here and we'll see then.

Good luck,
Moishe