I have a 4.5 year old desktop PC that I built.

Specs first:

ASUS M2N SLI-Deluxe
AMD x2 4200+ @ 2.2 Ghz (not OCed)
6GB of Corsair XMS2 DDR2 800 RAM (2x1 GB, 2x2 GB, all same brand)
Nvidia 8800 GTS 512MB (Zotac manufactured)
Antec 550 W PSU

1 250 GB HDD
1 1TB HDD

Dual boot of Windows 7 64-bit Pro and Ubuntu 10.10

Anyway,

I went out today. I left in the morning, returned in the evening. I left with my computer on, in what was a working condition. I came back, it was still on, but I moved my mouse and the monitors didn't turn on. They said they had no signal.

I restarted, got to the boot manager, chose Windows 7. I got to the "starting Windows," but the flag animation never happened, and it never went further than that. I tried the repair deal, and nothing happened. I tried safemode, and it hung up on classpnp.sys.

So I tried Ubuntu, and it got stuck on the Pulse Audio speech dispatcher being disabled, and the boot up stopped. I tried a newer kernel, and I was greeted by a black screen with a blinking cursor.

I haven't tried any boot CDs or LiveCDs.

I'm having trouble getting it to boot too. It will post, but it will load up the BIOS and just freeze at the BIOS screen. I also can't get into it either. Sometimes restarting it by turning off the power can fix this issue and get me past the BIOS, but then the OSes won't boot.

I just unplugged it and I reset the memory and the video card, and it didn't do jack shit.

I'm kind of inclined to think that it's not the memory, as usually a bad memory module will still allow you to boot to an OS, but you'll just get bad system stability issues. I have two HDDs. Windows 7 is on the 1 TB and Ubuntu on the 250 GB. The odds of having both HDDs die on the same exact day is statistically highly improbable to the point where I rule it out.

The research I did on some of the issues is kind of pointing me in the direction of the video card. I have a 7900 GT, but that's at home and I have no other video card I can try out as of now, and no onboard video to fall back on. I guess it could also be the PSU.

Any suggestions or tips? I don't have any money to spend on the computer, so if it's the motherboard, I'll just hold onto it until I get some money and use the video card, DVD drive and HDDs in a new computer as well as my 2 monitors and just sell of the memory or something. It's 4.5 years old, so I don't really want to spend any money on it if I don't have to. And quite honestly, I really don't want to resort using the 7900 GT as the latest Nvidia drivers don't work for it on Windows Vista/7.

I just tried booting into Windows 7 again. I saw the Windows flag animation start, and then it just froze and the computer stopped booting. Looks like the video card is on its way out. Seems as though the more I try, the worse it gets, which indicates to me that heat is building up, which cases it to fuck up. Letting it cool down makes the problems get better, but it heats up quickly to the point that it fucks up. Maybe I can find something like 4670 or something to replace it with for cheap. It's a downgrade, I know, but I don't really care.

[Edited on December 6, 2010 at 8:26 PM. Reason : .]

12/6/2010 8:20:42 PM

Try the liveCD and try repairing (or reinstalling) your bootloader. That would be my first guess.

12/6/2010 11:15:40 PM