Help! My Vista gaming rig recently stopped working. It wil run thorugh BIOS fine, but after it posts all I get is a BLINKING CURSOR on the top left of the screen, no OS, no nuthin'. My ASUS Crosshair mobo has been replaced by ASUS, so they found SOMETHING wrong with it, but even after the replacement I'm still having the exact same problem. Putting in my Vista disc doesn't have any effect. I THINK it might be my SATA SEAGATE Barracuda 250GB hard drive, bt I can't be sure- it spins up and the read light blinks a bit, but nothing else.

Can someone please offer some guidance?! Thanks!check your bios settings to make sure it recognizes the disk drives and cd/dvd drives. Make sure they are set to boot in an order (cd first, then hdd).Thanks for the reply, but I tried all different combinations of boot priority. As the pc posts BIOS and then won't go further, it looks like my SATA HD somehow bit the dust. I'm gonna buy an inexpensive smaller SATA drive to make sure the connection works, and if it does I'll barrage Seagate with nastiness so that they fix my HD (hopefully). If anyone else has any ideas, by all means lemme know!

Cheers.Use the pause key to see for sure the HDD is being detected....and or enter Setup to see if it is there and healthy.The HD IS being detected by my BIOS, which is the weird part. It reads the proper HD ID in the proper SATA port, and the HD spins up a little, but no OS boot :-/ I'm going in a few minutes to pick up a WD 160GB SATA hard drive, we'll see if I can format and instal Vista on it and get it running.

Thanks for the reply!The problem is since XP when there is a major hardware change which you have the OS gets cranky and doesn't want to behave...

Repair install of Vista

Note: I have not tried this method as of yet as my Vista install has so far had no problems...it's on my todo list....OK, now I'm flummoxed. I get a blue screen of death (Driver overstacked the buffer?! Its a newly formatted drive, how are there even all that many drivers ON THERE?!) after installing Vista on my BRAND NEW HDD, and then when I tried to do the repair on my old drive from the site you guys sent me to, Vista won't load up to do the repair, it gets stuck perpetually at the loading bar. When I switched back to the new drive again the pc loads to the blue screen of death and then restarts again and again.

This is getting worse and worse, man...Try installing XP if you have a XP disk. If XP works fine, then you can either blame it on vista, the mobo or hdd. You could download a linux live cd (like ubuntu) and see if linux works too. I've gotten linux to work on hard drives that windows can't work with.You may want to download and run the free diagnostics available at the appropriate hard drive maker's site.Gang-

Thanks for all the help, but in the end it looks like it was something simpler than I realized. I finally tracked down the BSOD error message (it would flash and reboot so quickly I couldn't catch it) and it looks as though one of my 1GB sticks of Corsair XMS2 RAM went bad. I'm gonna RMA that *censored*! Thanks again folks.

People don't think Corsair is worth the price...but doesn't it feel just GREAT to send one back for a brand new stick ? ? ?

Troubleshoot the memory. If u have a spare memory, use it. If u r using 2 memories, remove one of them. Boot using either of the memory. One of them could be malfunctioning.Netori, The problem is already solved. Didn't you read that up there? Or from another thread :

Quote

This usually happens when you install an old memory to a new mboard. Try REMOVING the memory and reinstall it again. Make sure you insert it properly. wiping the memory conductors before installing it might help. Beware of Electro static discharge (ESD) however.