Won't BOOT past BIOS or DOS screen

seaharrior · Post by **seaharrior** » August 16th, 2005, 3:43 pm

I have never seen this. My Dual Core Opteron 275 was working fine for few days. After I restarted, it won't load windows and I have a green light on monitor but nohting on the screen. After 15 minutes I recycled the power, it said"XP did not load normally, do you want to start Safe mode". I wanted to start in safe mode, then same thing once the OS Menu goes, does not load windows. I ran Setup thinking something wrong, and choose the option to Repair the installation after it detected the System FIles folder, it copied the installation files and when it came time to reboot to start Windows XP installation from windows mode. IT got stuck on the black screen again. No windows installation. I thought there might be problem with the systems files. So I started a Fresh install and even formatted the HDD, it formatted fine and copied files then when it came to load windows or run the windows part of setup it would stay in black screen. Here's all i tried: Things tried so far to fix the system boot problem: -Tried to reinstall operating system by formatting HDD -Replaced Video Card with MSI 8x Graphics card -Replaced HDD with ATA HDD and tried to install OS, but does not go past DOS installation screen -Replaced Memory with other Memory tried 1 Memory chip, and 2 diferent chips - Reset BIOS from Jumper - Removed the PCI NIC and removed changed Keyboard/Mouse/monitor/CD Drive - Tried to install Windows 2003, still does not go past the dos screen SO I tried to install XP didn't work, so to make sure it is not the CD, i tried to install 2003 same problem. My computer specs are: Motherboard: IWill DK8N Bios: lates V11 CPU: Dual Core Opteron 275 Mem: CorSair 2 GB CAS 2.0 Video: ATI AIW x800 Pro (tried other card too from MSI) All PCI Slots Empty. The above configuration was working fine for few days, when I rebooted the problem started. Your Help would be highly appreciated and Thanks in advance!

richh0323 · Post by **richh0323** » August 20th, 2005, 1:04 am

Sounds like a hardware problem, dissconnect anything you can, go to bare bones one stick memory, graphics card, and hard drrive see if you can boot, try with the other stick of ram. If it will boot reconnect one thing at a time, if not do you have a spare hard drive? try this in bare bones config,

seaharrior · Post by **seaharrior** » September 1st, 2005, 4:31 pm

Thanks Richh for your reply. Finally received DK8N motherboard from iWill and replaced my current board. It did not make much difference. HOwever, I discovered one thins, using Western Digital 36GB 10K drives in Raid 0 mode, if using controller by nVidia the system reboots again and again. WOrked with iWIll on this issue but was not able to resolve. I am wondering if there is a problem with this version of BIOS incompt., Moving those Raid 0 to SiL314 on board, goes past bios, but OS does not see the drives as raid, sees them individual drives. Tried drivers provided by Silicon and also tried drivers posted at Iwill for this motherboard. So I got tired and installed ATA100 hard drive and installed Win Xp, Win MCE, and Win 64. Used the pc no problems for few days. After installing antivirus i had to reboot Win MCE. ONce I rebooted there, the problem is back. won't go past Multi OS Menu. After one hour I still try to reboot, it says Windows did not start properly and the menu.. when i try to start in safe mode, it just goes no where. However, on that same hard drive, Win 64 is still up and running. I can load x64. This tells me there might not be any hardware issue in my system. But if it is software, then what could be causing this????? Your input is highly appreciated....