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Computer doesn't look for OS on startup, won't boot

W

wruzicka1

Junior Member
howdy all -

I have an old computer that hasn't been powered on for ~2 months but worked fine before that. Today I hooked it up to a new TV to use in another room and it starts up fine, goes through BIOS and shows me the RAID controller screen which finds the RAID 5 array and says it's healthy (windows vista is installed on a 3 disk raid 5 array on this machine) but after the raid screen I get nothing - no attempt to load windows, no error message, just a black screen that stays indefinitely. F8 doesn't get me to safe mode, bootable disk in the optical drive gives the same black screen, any ideas on what's going on and how I might save this computer?

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated...

3 1TB drives in Raid 5
2x2 gigs Corsair DDR2
Dual core pentium e2160
Antec 430 watt PSU
Nvidia 8800gt
 
you dont have any usb thumb drives or external hard drives plugged in do you?

and what os is installed on the machine
 
Thanks for the advice Thrill Kill but part of my problem is that I can't boot from the vista install CD. After the RAID controller screen telling me the array is healthy I get a black screen that sits there indefinitely, and with a bootable vista install cd in the drive with BIOS set to look to the drive first for boot I get the same black screen.
 
Have you hooked in a regular monitor? Vista might be making your tv monitor two so that while Vista is booted your tv becomes a black screened screen two (no background is applied to monitor 2 until after login).
 
Just for curiosity, you could try booting from a Linux CD. Maybe you could at least get up and running. I was able to use my computer for a while with this method when I had a hard disk failure and windows would not load.
 
Open the PC and disconnect the hard drives, then boot from any bootable CD. If it does boot then you'll at least know it's not a hardware issue.

heymrdj said:
Have you hooked in a regular monitor? Vista might be making your tv monitor two so that while Vista is booted your tv becomes a black screened screen two (no background is applied to monitor 2 until after login).
Click to expand...

This is a definite possibility, and may require booting with the regular monitor connected first so you can enable the TV output.
 
You're the man heymrdj, and I feel like a putz.
It was just that the pc detects that it's connected to a HDTV and tries to make it monitor 2, even though there is no monitor 1. Does anyone know how I can get around this?
 
Unplug it until you're on, then reconnect it and change your other monitor to be #1, that, or resolve anything that requires user input up until it figures out both monitors.
 
wruzicka1 said:
You're the man heymrdj, and I feel like a putz.
It was just that the pc detects that it's connected to a HDTV and tries to make it monitor 2, even though there is no monitor 1. Does anyone know how I can get around this?
Click to expand...

Just checked back in, glad to see you found out what it was. Like Virucyde said you'll have to change the monitor to primary once you're on the homescreen. That should make it boot to it by default. The issue isn't actually Windows, it's your graphics card/driver. Vid Card manufactures hard assign the ports numbers. I had this same issue with my desktop connected to my TV. The TV was HDMI and my side monitor was DVI-1. HDMI had preference over DVI-1 so it would boot to my tv instead of my monitor.
 
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