Okay, so I am completely stuck. My system is an NEC Pentium 2, 233Mhz, 384MB SDRAM, NEW WD 40GB HD, NEC 3.5" Floppy, CD-ROM, Modem Blaster V.92, and 3Dfx Voodoo 5 5000 Video Card.

I had a 4GB HD running my operating system with a 16GB HD as a data storage disk. The 16GB was thrashing, so I bought a brand new WD 40GB HD and installed it yesterday, 5/8/05. I installed Windows XP Professional, Office 2003, FrontPage 2003, Publisher 2003, HP 1012 driver software, Modem Blaster V.92 driver software, and the drive was working perfectly. I copied my settings over from the old hard drive to access the internet, and logged onto the internet. Was on for about 2 minutes when the system froze. Task Manager took forever to load, and then it froze too. I shutdown the system, and screwed in the HD to the case. In the process, one of the screws fell onto the back of the daughter board, but the power cable was disconnected.

I rebooted the system, and the computer went throught the boot up procedure without a hitch, but when it passed all of the drives and went to load the OS, the screen went blank with a blinking white cursor in the top left corner of the screen.

I tried removing the Modem and rebooting, didn't work!
I tried disconnecting the floppy drive (after noticing that the light stayed on), didn't work!
I tried reordering the boot order to boot from the HD first, didn't work!
I tried reconnecting the old HD to boot from it, didn't work!
There are no disks in the disk drives (floppy or CD)!

I don't know what else to do?? I think that there may be a hardware problem, but it just seems strange that it was working and then all of a sudden it started doing this.

If anyone has any advice, I would greatly appreciate it. I am going to try to boot from the Windows XP CD-ROM to see if there is something that I have missed. If that doesn't work, then I will be back with a new note.

How large is the power supply? You swapped harddrives...you didn't leave both in, right?

And, wow...p2 233 and XP? I'm surprised the thing starts at all almost.

Have you turned off all the eye candy?

I actually fixed the problem last night. I was up 'til 12am working with my brother to fix it.

We changed multiple BIOS settings, and that is what seems to have fixed the issue. We think that it was either a bad BIOS setting that was causing the problem, or the clock battery is going out, or the mother/daughter board is going out.

Just to answer the last post, the power supply is 200W, and I only have the 40GB HD in there now. I have been running XP on my machine for about 1.5 years now.

Also, what is meant by 'Eye Candy'??

Thanks for the help!