I have a bit of a problem. I went to turn my PC on the other day and it posted fine but when it tried to load Windows (2k pro) the black and white display showed the bar loading across the bottom then went to the color W2K Pro starting display and the color bar on the bottom loaded just fine.
This is the bad part. Just at where one would expect the desktop to appear it goes blank and stays blank. The hard drive seems to be doing something, what I can't tell. ctrl+alt+del has no effect.

Steps I've taken are:
clear CMOS
start in safe mode
start with only HDD, FDD, CDROM connected
replacing the hard drive with a spare I have
re-seating all PCI/AGP boards
starting up with W2k boot disks, it takes them fine then when it's time to start W2K it freezes.

MB is MSI KT3 Ultra
256 MB DDR333
AMD Athlon 1700+
Geforce 4 MX440 64MB video (forgot the brand)
Maxtor 40 GB ATA 133 (EIDE)
300W P/S

This machine had been dooing just fine for months (since I built it) until now that is.

The last thing I did to it was remove an ATI TV tuner. And yes I did try it with the board re-installed; no change.

Any ideas?

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Are you saying it does start in Safe Mode?

Can you boot into DOS and access the drive that way? You could at least back up your file if you can.

I am not that familiar with Win2K, but others will be along who are...

Yes, it won't start in safe mode. I don't think starting up with a Win9x or WinME startup disk to use DOS will work unfortunately. The hard drive(s) are formatted using NTFS instead of FAT32, I don't think non-NT windows/DOS can recognise NTFS can they? A good suggestion though. I only have non-NT machines at work.

BTW, backing up files on these drives isn't a worry, they've been copied onto another PC it's networked with, just happened to do it a couple days earlier. I just want this one back working so my son can use it and leave mine alone. It's mainly used for games now.

Oh, and thanks for the welcome.

If it is already well backed up, you could always go for the wipe and reinstall. That will correct most software problems, with a bit of hassle of course.:rolleyes: However, I would wait for more knowledgeable responses before taking that step.