A power surge can damage any number of things and lead to the symptoms you have. Troubleshooting a non-booting system has been described many times and the basic steps don't change. First test with a known good powersupply. Next strip it down to basics.ie disconnect everything except Motherboard, CPU with hsf, 1 stick of ram, graphics and keyboard. That means unplug the IDE and power cables to all drives, remove any extra ram and PCI cards etc. If you still get no diaplay then you've isolated the problem to one or more of those basic components. If it will boot then shut down, add back one device at a time rebooting between each to work out which is causing the problem. I have one system here that has a dead PCI slot. Any device inserted in that slot causes bootfailure. otherwise it runs perfectly. I've seen others with faulty CDROMs that caused the same symptoms. It's a process of elimination to determine exactly what your particular problem is. I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

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Thanks, unfortunatly I don't have a reliable PSU, and I can't really afford anything in the way of spare parts, however I will begin unplugging and troubleshooting. I already know both my CD trays are guilt free, but I think it might be related to my SATA drive. Anyways, I'll troubleshoot some more, and then post my results back here.

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i'm having the same problem with mine. pc turns on, doesn't beep, doesn't show bios or load windows. i've tested it with another hard drive- no change. the HD still spins, but that's it. i've tried unplugging the drive (it's my only drive other than dvdrom) from the board and at the drive itself. so i'm pretty sure it's not a drive issue. the power supply still kicks on, the dvd drive blinks, i know it's not the graphics card, that leaves it down to the ram, the board, and the cpu. all are less than a year old. i don't think ram because past ram problems at least allow the pc to start and give a memory message. as for the cpu, i have one in my other pc that is missing like 3 pins. it still runs. mind you it's got it's quirks and i need to replace it, but it works. there is no damage whatsoever to the cpu in the machine in question. it wasn't messed with other than a delicate cleaning and reapplying of artic silver. that leads me to believe it's a motherboard issue. it's gotta be. this has happened before with this pc. i used to unplug it and it was fine. that's not working this time. the odd thing is, i let it sit for a couple hours, it started back up. it gave me the black windows screen with the options of starting windows normal or last good config, etc. windows just hung there at the loading screen. so i restarted again. the same thing. the next time i restarted.... nothing. started up, back to no beep, just black screen. does anyone think i'm on the right track with the motherboard being my culprit? any other suggestions?

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never mind, my mb had a scratch

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