Ok.

Problem Number 1:

I bought my main system that I use now in November, because in Novemember my Dell computer started acting rediculously sporadically and I was just fed up with it so I decided to build my own computer.

Specs:

550w Antec PSU
Corsair 2x512 XMS
80 WD SATA HD
eVGA 7800 GT
MSI K8N Diamond Plus MOBO
AMD 64+ Venice 3200 (I had this clocked at 2.4 ghz but it was idling at like 20 C so I know the OC was completely unrelated to the death).

Anyways. I originally had a Asus a8n-sli mobo but I had two of them die on me, one in less than a day after setting it up. The boards would spin up all normal when they were in death throws, but not give out any video, the monitor would act like there wasn't any output being sent whatsover, but the fan on the gpu was spinning up.

Well I finally was fed up with asus so I bought the MSI board assuming it would help. Well my neighbor came over and his psu was crapping out (we thought) and wanted to see if my psu would help him out. So I disconnected the psu from my mobo, pluged it into his, and fired it up. No go. Didn't even start up his comp. Then we hooked mine back up and it started doing the crap where only the fans spun up but no video. So I pulled the gpu and ram to try to do a post test, but after I pulled them I got NO startup whatsoever. NONE. I messed around with everything and couldn't get the PSU to spin up in the least. So I RMA'ed the PSU and hopefully that was the problem. (do you guys think it was)? I am getting no help at all from anyone because Monarch - the people I bought the mobo/cpu from are saying that I'm just jacking them around or something.

Problem Number 2:

So I still have that dell computer
2.4 Ghz p2
512 Mb Ram
Radeon 9800 That idles at like 140 F

So I pulled that Radeon and put in my old old tnt2 and put linux on it and used it as a HLDS for TFC (a half life mod). It worked fine since i didn't actually have a monitor connected to it. Well Its summer now and I'm paying a assload for internet service, and so I bought a cheap AGP Geforce 4 planning to install XP back on this shit dell computer untill I get my main computer back up and running. Well when I insert either the Dell XP disk or my XP Pro disk (the xp pro is 100% absolutely legit and works fine). It boots to the part where it says "detecting hardware" and then just loads a black screen and stops.

Any ideas? I'm running fedora core 5 and think that if theres some way I could wipe the drives completely maybe it would load up.

Thanks if you guys can help!

quote:

Originally posted by Marty:
Any ideas? I'm running fedora core 5 and think that if theres some way I could wipe the drives completely maybe it would load up.

well thats a bitch itself. as i use mandrake 10.1 official, red hat 9 and suse. and to deleted them partitions you can use the xp pro disc and delete them as being non dos partitions. but if you cant get the xp disc to load past hardware detection. that screws up that idea.

windows 98 disc cant uninstall mandrake. but maybe if you boot up that to work without cd support, and enter fdisk you could delete it as a non dos there?

its a long shot. but worth a try.

alternatively, put in a hard disk without linux as the primary and put the HDD that you want to clear as a secondary. then when you load up the xp disk on the primary. it will show the secondary drive up aswell. and then you can clear it

Well. I don't have any other Parallel ATA drives that I have the ability to mess w/. And The old dell comp obviously doesn't have SATA support.

I don't have any copies of 98, but I downloaded this iso off the internet that sounds like its a reasonable utility.

Basically I wish I knew that messing around w/ my harddrive won't just mess this up even more.

If there is a linux - fedora partitioning program, that would be ace.

http://falcon.jmu.edu/~jarvislb/utils/bin/boot98cd.exe

download that and put it onto a floppy disk, reboot with floppy drive as the first boot device set in your bios.

when it loads run fdisk

fdisk /mbr (clears master boot record)

then run it again to redo your partitions

then format the partition with format c: /u or format d: /u or whatever.

then install windows.

as for your video card problems, do the cards have onboard fans? check those. also video tends to cut out or a system stops running when a cpu overheats or is just fucked. I would suggest checking the fan over your cpu heatsink and if it is not running, attach the power plug on it to another 12v slot on the mobo. Just try that anyway. It could also be your psu, try another one ?