I'm trying to fix this custom-built PC for a friend of mine. I have no problem accessing BIOS or booting to drive A system disk. In fact I could access the system partition. I guess the above rules out the case of a bad video card. Booting to XP is a different story. The initial boot screen reads fine but then instead of getting Welcome Screen I received "Message: No Signal." I rebooted and the next thing it does is running System File Check. I rebooted again and received the same No signal message. I'm not sure what the problem is? (Oh by the way he asked me to use the brand new LCD that he bought The LCD works just fine.) Thanks i_XpUser

It could still be video drivers XpUser. Booting to a bootdisk means the video is running in basic VGA mode. Try booting to Safe Mode. If you get the same results, reboot and choose VGA mode. If that does the trick then it's still possible it's the drivers. However, before you try upgrading or reinstalling the video drivers, if you can boot into VGA mode, reduce the resolution first and try a reboot into a normal startup. I recently ran into a situation at work where we added a KVM switch to a PC with an LCD monitor and had to switch it from it's digital connector to analog. As soon as we did the screen went black (no "no signal" message though). We booted to VGA mode, got a display and found updating the video drivers didn't fix it. Then I reduced the resolution to 1024 X 768 and it worked fine. My thinking is the LCD couldn't handle that high a res running on analog.

so this issue pertains to displaying windows correct? from your post it sounds like there are two monitors, an older one, and the new LCD, the video works with the LCD but not the old monitor (whatever it may be) or are you still not able to get into windows (displaywise) with the new LCD but the LCD works on another machine? You may want to try turning on the machine and before getting the XP splash screen pressing the f8 key and selecting "VGA mode" and setting the display at either 800x600 or 1024x768 most LCD monitors can only handle max 1280x1024 post back with more info/if you were able to get into vga mode yup!

Cheers to you both Curt R and Josh. I booted XP with VGA mode, went past the Welcome screen...the VGA mode works. But the icons and text in this mode is you know ..huge. What should I do next? Change the resolution? i_XpUser

With the information given in the original and subsequent posts and some guesswork the diagnosis so far: Initially the PC had an incompatible Video Driver causing the "No Signal" error. With Safe Mode you just temporarily got rid of that symptom by not loading that video Driver. VGA driver uses low Video resolution and limited Colors and the expected large display size and 'dingy' colors. Now you need to treat the original underlying cause of the "No Signal" symptom which is the lack of proper Video Driver. I hope you have the Driver Disc ready. Install that driver. If you have an embedded Video card in this system in addition to an Add-on Card, you should uninstall the driver for the Embedded driver through Device Manager before rebooting; otherwise reboot and see. M

yes, from vga mode change your resolution to 800x600 or 1024x768 and then reboot your machine and see if it works...you MAY not need to reinsatll the driver... yup!