Desperate for help with boot problem!

I had the same problem and found the issue to be due to the power supply. Even though my power supply was ATX it did not have an extra 4-pin connection. I replaced the power supply with one that had the extra 4-pin connection and everything works fine.

If you have the board which has no Nvidia tnt chip, you will get no display unless you install a video card and the BIOS is set to the type card you install. That is you will get no display if the BIOS is set to PCI and you install an AGP card. You will have to install the type card the BIOS is set for (which you will not know until you see the BIOS).
The easy solution , if you have both PCI and AGP video cards is to install both of them. Then however the BIOS is set, you will get display from one.

Always go back to what you did last. I have a bad power connector on my ps. I noted this when installing another hdd. I tried it with the regular drive and the thing worked fine. When upgrading a cpu, always clear cmos on this thing. I upgraded from 1.6 to 3.0 and cleared cmos manually to get it right. It works. Make sure you have everything hooked up exactly as it was before. If you still have the original case, see if it works that way. If so, then check for compatibility with the new ps. In other words, what the last guy said.

Well, I too had the same silent unit problem. The only thing that worked was the system fan, the hard drive and the DVD. I tried a different (working) CPU, and the original CPU worked fine on another MOBO. Tried a different (working) power supply, memory, graphics card, still nothing. I just cautiously popped out what seemed the be the BIOS chip (it read K7S41GX....), cleaned the pins 0n the chip and on the MOBO and carefully replaced the chip. The system booted fine after that.

A while back, I had this same kind of problem. I couldn't start my computer up becuase a file in the hard drive was corrupt. In attempt to fix it, I flipped a switch on the back of my power supply, and then it didn't even load into the bios. So i suggest that if you have a power supply unit with a voltage switch on the back, switch it. It should be a red switch inside the power supply if you have one. I hope this helps you.

I am currently troubleshooting a PC with the exact smae symptoms. It uses a Gigabyte 8S661FXM motherboard. When it powers on there are no beeps. The HDD light comes on for about 10 seconds and the DVD drive light will come on for about the same amount of time but at different intervals. I have used another PSU and that doesn't make a difference. I used a POST code analyser card with the mobo still in the case and the card wouldn't go past its own initilisation. The card was in a PCI slot and consistent with the HDD and DVD lights coming on the card indicated that the PCI slot was receiving a reset signal (which doesn't happen in a working PC). I took the mobo out of the case and stripped in down so that there wasn't even a CPU in it. I tried to boot on the bench and got the same conditions. Regardless of what components I addded nothing more would happen. A visual inspection of the capacitors does not indicate any problems. My current guess is that a faulty component on the mobo is preventing the boot and sending a fault signal causing it to reset itself creating a loop. No hardware was changed prior to this issue developing. It started as a random reboot/occasional fail to boot and has just gotten worse.

Same problem with same board but athlon64 3000+. I've upgraded to Antec 380w true power and case, stripped everything out, purchased another set of 256mb dimm. I'm at a total loss here.

I recently swapped in a 'new/old' video card Geforce MX440 AGP 8 into the AGP slot (this version fitted) to replace the TNT2 just to see if it would work (and thus be a back up spare)..it worked though as a PCI card not a AGP. Any how what I did note is that it often caused a boot error .. beeeep beep beep.. then would go no further. The solution to that problem was to (eventually) pull out the card just a little bit in its slot. Seems it makes a better connection not pushed all in. So you may wish to play with your Video AGP slot. If you want to flash the bios then dont forget to remove the jumper clip first. You can get the BIOS by going to the gateway site and type in product no. 4000532 if your board is the same as mine. It has a list in its help file at the bottom that tells what product numbers the downloaded bios will support...usually a bunch of them. TIP Ive just eventually found the BIOS for this Tabor III P600E Gateway. But the only way to test it is to actually re-flash the BIOS - not a good idea if nothing is wrong - However I did see a small note.... Your Floppy BIOS disk will not work if you formatted it on Win 2000 or XP.... it states you need to use a pre-formatted IBM floppy... ie go out and buy new disks. TIP 2. I loaded my purchased version of Win XP onto this old machine & linux ubuntu 10.6 But didn't want to connect it to the net to activate it - the way around the 30 day expiry period is to go into the BIOS each time you want to use XP and keep changing the date to the same day...ie the day you installed the software. It will then keep telling you that you have 29 days to activate. Dont play around trying to use different days each time...XP will deduct a day if it sees a change in days... So keep using the same day. It all works like a charm now...including a Chinese writing tablet :] for my wife.

I had a similar problem. Motherboard was powering up but no graphics activity, and no post signal. I removed all the ram and powered up, it posted. Then replaced each piece and powered up to see if it posted. I assumed I had a faulty piece, but I didn't. Either I installed one piece improperly, which is unlikely but I admit possible, or its some quirk of the mobo. Please note this was after a rebuild with brand new mobo, if you've upgraded or transported your comp, maybe theres something the matter with your ram. Not that its faulty, just take it all out and see if it posts. The post signal for "no ram present" is a single long beep.

Unfortunately you haven't given enough information. I will assume that this unit was working at some time and that you tried to improve it in some manner. Actually what this sounds like is an overloading of the power supply. If you recently added any hardware I would start there (i.e., remove it). If that doesn't work then try a different HDD (that is properly formatted, of course). You could also start from your last step and add hardware one at a time until it works.