So, I finally got my HDD to fire up again in my Dell 3000.
Now there's a new problem. I spun it all up and it got so far as the scrolling Windows XP logo. Then, after that screen went away, I got a blank, black screen. Nothing happened. The HDD reading light blinked a few times, but that's about it. I did a hard shutdown and booted into safe mode, and when I got into Windows, it asked me for the driver disk for my PNY GeForce 5500. I gave it to the machine and when it finished playing with itself I rebooted, yet I still got no screen after the scroll. Any ideas?
One other peculiar thing. I noticed that the fan is spinning up to a VERY loud speed. It seems like the fan thinks the CPU is ridiculously overheated, yet the air it's shooting out the rear end of the case is quite cool. I was wondering if this might be the problem: When I was swapping the mobo out during my previous troubleshooting process, I had to seperate the heatsink from the processor. The thermal paste was seperated, but when I put it back together, I assumed the paste was touching again. Could this be wrong?
And why am I lacking a screen here? lol.
Mark