I just put my old PC parts into a new case and tried to boot it up. It's not crashing, looping, or beeping. It loads the BIOS just fine, and detects the disks in the start up menu, but it doesn't do anything after the BIOS loads. It just sits there displaying that little blinking cursor from dosprompt and nothing happens. This all worked fine before, any advice? It's a compaq presario with windows XP.

If the hard drive you are attempting to boot from came out of an OEM computer it is tied to that hardware. Changing the motherboard, for instance will most likely result in a no boot situation. OEM vendors pay Microsoft very little for the Windows copies they install. The trade off is they can't be reused on another machine. What components are different than what was in the original computer? Changing the case shouldn't cause that problem unless cables or boot settings are wrong.

The case, the power supply, and the IDE cables have been changed. I put in a Geforce 7300 a while back before I changed the case and it ran just fine. There is also a new slave drive, but I still have the same problem even if i disconnect it.

flashing cursor usually means no master boot record. Double check your bios's detection of the hard drive. You may have a conflict/short. Disconnect everything except video card/keyboard/mouse and drive. note: drive means only drive connected to the cable. no other connections

"little blinking cursor from dosprompt" Is it next to a C:> or is it blinking with no text. Try typeing DIR and see what happens. If nothing Types, then try rebooting but hold down F8 and choose Safe Mode.

There is no C:> Just the cursor I'll try all the tips in a little bit when I get to my PC. Thanks for all the great advice! And Feel free to keep the suggestions coming.