Boot Problems - Just a Black Screen

[scottlpz]

Okay, so I decided to upgrade my system. This is the current configuration:
ABIT NF7-S Rev. 2.0 Motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 3200+ (Barton 400MHz FSB)
512MB PC3200 Kingston HyperX RAM
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB
Enermax EG465P-VE Power Supply
CD-ROM Burner 24x/10x/40x (unknown manufacturer - possibly Plextor?)
Two Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 80GB SATA/150 hard drives

I have a Thermaltake Volcano 12 cooler on the CPU, and a Vantec Vortex hard drive cooler set up for each hard drive, which are also set up in a striped RAID 0 config. The RAM is in two 256MB sticks and I put them in DIMM slots 2 and 3, as the motherboard manual suggested. Everything seems to be connected properly and is getting power.

My problem is this: when I boot up the computer, everything powers up fine - all the fans, etc. But, all I get on the screen is a black screen and the monitor light flashes green as if it were not getting any signal from the computer (but it is, because if it weren't, it would have a different screen). I cannot even get to the BIOS or the POST. Does anyone have any idea what could be wrong? Thanks in advance.

ADDITION: I removed the temperature monitor from underneath the CPU and re-installed it into the motherboard. Now, when I boot up I get one long beep and a short beep, but still a black screen and no POST (Power On Self Test). I have a feeling it is related to how ATI wants its molex connectors to connect to the hard drive AND the power supply. Because my drives are SATA, I have a feeling this may be messing things up. Maybe I could connect it to the CD-ROM drive instead, since it is on the IDE channel? Honestly, I don't see why it needs two connections, anyway. Please help!

--
Scott
Trying to build the gaming machine of my dreams

 

[scottlpz]

Bump

 

[Bug]

I'm assuming that when you said you taped a temperature sensor to the bottom of the cpu, that you meant to the heatsink attached to the cpu? You didn't actually put a temp sensor between the cpu & heatsink instead of thermal compound did you? This doesn't seem likely, as you seem to have a pretty good idea of what you're doing.
Keep in mind that I had a similar problem, that turned out to be a bad motherboard I think.

 

[scottlpz]

Actually, yes, it was attached directly to the CPU's underbelly (the part with all the pins) with the supplied thermal tape. When I put the CPU in the socket, it looked like it was completely down all the way. I suppose I'm going to try taking that off and just setting the fan to go full speed all the time. The point of the temp. monitor was to automatically change the fan speed based on the CPU's temperature. And yes, I used Arctic Silver compound on the actual die (the top of the CPU) between the heatsink and CPU.

 

[scottlpz]

Bump

 

[scottlpz]

Bump

 

[scottlpz]

PROBLEM RESOLVED:

I think the temp. sensor on the bottom of the CPU was causing the Socket A chip not to seat correctly (all the way into the socket). Thus, taking that out got me to the point where I could hear beeps. I looked up what the beeps meant for my BIOS (Award), and lo and behold it meant the VGA card was set up improperly. I took it out of the AGP slot, clicked it back in, and viola! It booted no problem. Pissed me off too that it was something so simple. Thanks for the help, guys.

Scott
Now has the gaming machine of his dreams