Video card upgrade issue: weird boot problem

[stongpa]

I just bought a Dell vostro 200 mini desktop machine.

I added one more harddrive, a PCI wireless card, they all work fine,
Then I put a ATI 3450 video card in it, it is a short card which can fit in the case and it does not need extra power.

However, I started to see a weird behavior: The machine will not boot after the first time.

Everytime I make some hardware change, such as unplug a hard drive, plug back a hard rive,
it will boot up without any problem, but then it will not boot, it hangs at the BIOS screen, the F2, F12 keys etc don't work so I can't enter into BIOS setup.

Using the on-bard video card, everything is fine.

My guess is that it is either the video card or the PSU.

Can anyone help please

 

[Ksyder]

Perhaps you exceeded the capabilities of the PSU? I would think this would cause it to not boot. Perhaps you should check the bios screen make sure it is set to initialize the pci slot first (or pci-ex is thats what the card is on) rather than onboard. That might help.

 

[stongpa]

but it does not explain why it would boot the first time, and once it boots, everything is fine, the machine is quite stable.
I will try to disable the onboard video card, thanks.