I reassembled an old computer we had in our basement to put linux on it and run it as a server. It's an IBM Aptiva 2137 E84, 300 MHz Pentium 2. The problem is, when i give it power, it gives no monitor signal through integrated, or it's PCI graphics card. The power light comes on and the cd rom drive comes to life, but the hard drive is silent and there is no monitor signal. I have the right ram, the only thing different from when we had it working before is the cdrom drive, a network card, and the hard drive. Can someone help me figure out what is wrong? Thanks for your help.

I would look and see if the cable (im assuming this is an IDE based system) on the HDD is not on backwards, that can cause a system not to boot and the HDD to appear dead. Make sure that it is set to master, and the cdrom is set to slave as well. If this does not work, I would remove every add in card in the system, and all drives, where all you have is the motherboard, ram, cpu, and video card. If it still does not want to boot, I would start looking at hardware failure on one of the above mentioned items. You never mentioned if it beeped or not, a lot of times you can tell by the beep codes what is wrong with a system. Not all BIOS's will have the same codes, so I would look it up for your paticular BIOS first. hope this helps

I have the same problem at the moment. I have disconnected everything and the damn board still won't post, no beeps either. In my case I suspect the BIOS needs reflashing as I think its cause of the problem. If you've carried out the procedures set out by Warlock then I think you could be looking at a failed BIOS ROM chip.

i have the EXACT same problem, i just rebuilt this yesterday. I got a geforce mx 400 pci tv out video card put in, when i boot it up, i hear the cd rom moving and it seems that the harddisk it vibrating,but the screen won't turn on, could there be ANY other problems i need to check? thanks for your time

well there's plenty of reasons.. you could have bad rom chip.. a faulty agp slot (replace mobo ;[ ) uhmm or of course your video card is faulty.

I'm having a similar problem on my laptop, when I press power the fan kicks on and drives spin, but no post - - cant access bios. if the bios is bad, how can I reflash it??