Recently, the power supply on my system blew out. I got a new sparkle 250 watt "amd compatible" power supply and put it in, without changing anything else in the system. I have 256 megs of RAM, an Athlon 650, 16 meg tnt2 video, sb live sound and two wd hard disks, one 32 gig, one 16, running on a FIC SD11 mobo. When I powered on the system, it detected the memory, hard drives, cdrom and cpu, and passed the POST with the usual single beep. Then it looked for a boot record from floppy, then cdrom, (as usual) but after that just sat there. If I put in a bootable floppy or cdrom, it says "boot record found" and will then just sit there. If at this point, I hit reset, it will display the video card's startup message and not get any farther. I have to power down the system and then it will do the same thing over again. Any ideas?

What was the power supply in the system before? Was it also a 250 watt? BTW AMD compatible does not mean AMD recommended. Sure it will have enough power to run the proc and the hard drive and a graphics card but two HD's and an ok sound card? I would bet that you most likely had something like a 275 or 300 before. It seems that the hard drives aren't initializing or something like that since the computer won't load, even though they are detected. Try taking out some non-essential things like one HD and the sound card. if it boots after that then you know you need a larger power supply. there are a few places that are pretty good so look around. Enermax power supplies are, I feel, pretty good for the price.

I tried running the system with only bare bones (one ram chip, one hd, video card, floppy, that's it) and it still did the same thing. Also, the wattage on my last power supply was the same as this one. Another weird symptom I found was this: I went into CMOS setup and after switching to a different menu in CMOS, the computer suddenly stopped responding to the keyboard. I'm at a loss, any ideas?

Um, wow, um.....Ok, well, if it cannot find the boot record then most likely there may be something wrong with the HD. Western digital makes the lifeguard tools that you can download and run to see/fix anything wrong with your HD. Try those in order to eliminate that possibility. FYI if you do need to replace it, plan on it taking a while for WD says that the HD will be sent back withing 7 to 9 days (on average). If you are across the country, aka east coast, then it can take up to five days to get it there with ground shipping with UPS. But that is just a bunch of banter. Download the lifeguard tools and see what happens. If that is the problem then we have found it but if nothing is wrong then repost results and I will try to think of something else.

The problem isn't either of the hard drives. I tested them on my roommate's computer. Also, the wd lifeguard tools make a bootable floppy, I tried a basic bootable floppy and it recognized a boot record on the floppy, but hung afterwards without actually booting. Also, if I use the the 64 meg RAM stick, it will boot as far as the non-graphical win2k startup screen and crash there. I'm confused.