All I get is a "black screen" :(

[Gun_Man]

Guys I wonder if anyone can help me?
I turned off my pc the other day and now when I go to turn it back on windows will not boot. Now I know a bit about PC?s and I made this one as well so I thought not to worry I am sure I will be able to fix it but its been like three days now and still no joy.
I have a Asus M4N78 PRO motherboard with 2X 500 SATA drives set to RAID SPAN and a 80gig IDE drive from my old pc. The two SATA drives are running Windows XP Media edition and the one IDE is running Windows 2000 NT.
Once I start the machine up it goes through RAM checks and RAID checks fine. It says all healthy but when it tries to boot windows its just a black screen. You can see the LED on the monitor is light green so some kind of video is coming through and the power on the USB mouse and Keyboard comes on as well almost like it is trying to boot but hanging. This is the same thing when trying to boot from my IDE drive running Win 2000, so I know its not the SATA drives or the RAID set-up.
Things I have tried to fix this problem are
I have changed the graphics card with another one. No joy
I have taken out the CMOS battery to reset MB. No joy
I have unplugged the power cables from the CPU fan and replaced, also taken out the power to the whole PC for 10 mins and replace again no joy.
Any ideas any one else had this problem?
Anything would be a help guys cheers.

[dik]

assuming you have at least 2 sticks of memory, pull 1 and try to boot, then swap for the other if not fixed, or could also be 1 of the hdd's stopping it booting. I know your bios says its all good but will only take a few minutes to try

[Gun_Man]

Ok so I just tried taking out the RAM sticks one at a time and then moving them both to the empty slots. No joy
Also I have taken out the SATA drives and just to boot the IDE drive but again no joy.
It seems as if it is going to boot, goes to a black screen with a white flashing cursor in the top left of the corner of the screen for about 3-5 seconds and then seems to flicker and then nothing just black screen

[dik]

Maybe a faulty dvd drive?

[cunny]

Have you tried booting from a windows cd?
Sounds like windows has got corrupted.

Dooubt will be anything serious with hardware as your getting BIOS POST.

Get a spare HDD (if got 1) and try installing windows onto that. I hope all your files were backed up as if it they were stored on the raid, will be lost.

[Gun_Man]

Ok so I have made some progress, unplugged the DVD drives and started it up, boots fine and then I see it ?WINDOWS 2000? boot screen I was like ?YES? its alive but my happiness was short lived as I now have the blue screen of death instead of the black screen of death. Same for the RAID drives Windows XP starts to boot you see the windows logo and after 30 secs that?s it PC recycles its self and I have to go through it all again. I tried to start is ?safe mode? but same thing after 30 secs. So we are getting somewhere lads but we ant out of the woods yet. Any more ideas?

[Meat-Head]

sorry, just looking at ~~~~ in another window.

windows 2000 and SATA does that mix?

sorry to intrude

[cunny]

On the xp instal. Try running scan disk from the recovery console with the /r switch.

[dik]

Have you got another power supply to try, maybe its not able to supply enough amps which is possibly why un plugging dvd drives has helped. just guessing though

[Canker_Canison]

Ok, I've just been distracted by a redhead with an amazing body. But I can confirm Windows 2000 does work with SATA. My setup at home has 2000 as only OS running from 2 SATA drives.

It sounds like corrupted HDD's to me. If you can get it to accept a boot disk, try running scan disk inc surface scan.

Also try a Live disk as this will help rule out memory & board faults. With the exception of the drive controllers.

[Gun_Man]

thanks guys,
I ran my win 2000 CD ROM and used recovery consol, using "chdks", "fixmbr" and "fixboot"
Same for Win XP. Now we are all singing all dancing once again. Cheers for the help guys could not have done it with out ya.