If anyone can give advice it would be greatly appreciated.
I'm attempting to assemble a computer for the first time from a barebones kit. I'm using the Abit NF7 nForce2 mobo with an Athlon 2600 XP (this was preassembled in the case with cooling fans and all). I added 512MB DDR PC2700 RAM, a DVD drive, a hard drive, and a 32MB NVIDIA PCI video card.
So I hooked it all up and started the computer up. The normal bios boot information comes up fine, and I can even get into the bios menus to make adjustments. In the menus I see that the DVD and hard drives are found (it displays their full names) so I assume everything is fine.
The problem is that when I try to start the process of installing an OS (Windows 2000 pro) the DVD drive appears to be going through the normal reading process but the screen is blank except for one dash in the top left.
The hard drive was formally a back up drive for another computer running Windows 2000 pro so I don't think formatting is an issue (?) and I tried booting from a floppy as well (I installed it just to try then unistalled it when I got the same results). I even borrowed a Windows XP disk and tried that with no luck.
So... my thoughts are that it has something to do with the video settings. I know that the video works on some level because I can see the bios boot sequence (i.e. processor and memory check) and I can get into the bios menus. My thoughts are that the Windows 2000 setup needs different display settings... it may actually be running in the background and I just can't see it. Does this make any sense? Anyone seen this before?
Thanks for the help,
Ryan
*I've abridged the details somewhate to keep this from becoming a monster post, but I've tried a variety of bios settings and can't seem to figure out what is going on.
** Please forgive any misuse of technical terms.. and please correct me if I have done so
