Hi, I was recently given an old PC from my girlfriend's dad, they got a new sweet Athlon AMD 2700+, the PC they gave me is about 7 years old, a P1 MMX (I think it's 166MHz but haven't checked) with 32MB of that old pre-SDRAM memory (I think it was called DIMM?). I was gonna set it up as a spare second PC in the living room, ya know. Anyway, it was working fine untill I took out one of the ram sticks to have a look so I'd know what to buy when i want to get more. I also put in a second hard drive (8GB Maxtor). I had set up the second HD on the same IDE cable as the original HD (as a slave), in the place that the CD ROM was originally connected (which I removed) and replaced the ram then booted up. All fans and LEDs are working, but it won't boot Windows and the monitor doesn't pick up anything. I took the second HD out and replaced the CD Rom and made sure all connections were secured in their original places but it still won't boot. I tryed it with an older P1 chip and the same thing happened. The HD makes a kind of noise like its trying to search then goes silent (but is still spinning). Nothing else happens after that. I'm stuck for ideas as to what to do, can anyone help? I checked the cideo card as well. How do I hard reset the CPU and BIOS? Any help at all would be very apreciated.

Try reseating the RAM. It sounds like the RAM may be loose. Also, it could also need to be in pairs and you may have put them in the wrong slot...

I agree with Hakemon, but if that doesnt work you can try this: Being so old, i'm guessing you dont have the mobo book - i hope you have good eyesight! Try looking on the motherboard for a jumper labeled JP7. This resets the CMOS memory and brought my bomb back to life. Move the jumper to pins 2&3 for a few seconds, then put them back to 1&2. Won't do any harm to try.