Hi. I need your help desperately and without it my PC is garbage so I hope you can be of some assistance!

My PC is standard HP factory model except for my 160GB Seagate HDD and an overclocked ATI Radeon 9550 Gfx card. The CPU is a 2.67 P4 that cannot be overclocked.

I was updating my Graphics drivers last week and when I went to reboot it wouldnt start (Buffer problem???). I decided to attempt to reformat and install a fresh copy of windows but would get a black screen before it would normally "Detect my hardware". So I tried to format with "BootIt NG" aka BING, which I did, and tried to install XP again and it didnt work--same thing. I then brought the HDD to my uncle and he formated and installed XP on his computer which I then tried to boot and that didnt work on my PC either.

At this point I figured it could be the RAM so I checked the ram and ran a bunch of ram tests on Boot (DocMemory, etc) and they all passed 100% so its not my ram. Im thinking its a buffer in my Motherboard somewhere andthat I might need to replace it but I read this morning that this sometimes is caused by the CDROM not being set to boot 1st in BIOS so, naturally, I tried setting it to boot first, above floppy, and that didnt work either.

Ive even tried illegal copies of windows thinking my copy was bad and I could just use my factory serial and thats totally not the case because I cant get any copies of XP to work ALTHOUGH I could boot a version of Linux from a BootCD.

Im at my witts end and am ready to start a bon fire with my PC. Please help me!!!

Hi whiskey...

Just wanting to get this right...when installing windows, it gets to the point of saying "Setup is detecting hardware" and shows a blank screen instead of anything?

Hi WhiskeyP,

From what your describing, black screen where it would normally detect the graphics card is a common ATI problem. This can happen in two places. Either a) just before the Windows logon screen appears -or- b) when it detects new hardware.

This means your graphics drivers. Even the standard Windows drivers sometimes have problems with a lot of ATI cards.

Try to uninstall the current driver in Safe Mode, and then install a Windows Default driver to test this. The importance of installing a Windows Default driver is so that it does not pickup the same ATI driver when you start Windows back in Normal mode.

Gotta point it out madmonkey...

Whiskey has formatted the drive...it's no longer a driver issue.

That is correct. While I was updating drivers at the time it does not seem to be a driver problem. I did format this drive, which previously had NO OS booting off it, and removed my Old 120GB Samsung, thinking it was old and outdated. The samsung is the one with Windows XP on it (still does) and is in storage. I get the same result from both HDDs.

Sorry for the mixup!

The problem lies in it does not load certain Boot tasks (Install OS & other assorted files such as Acronius and most security Rescue CD tasks). This is what led me to believe it was a RAM or Buffer problem in the Motherboard. My motherboard is made by MicroStar but I dont know much about it other than that and the fact that I cant overclock on it. The fact that I could use BING to format and partition is likely to the fact that it interrupts the boot process by installing itself to a seperate partition and thus might not use the same buffer tasks if it is indeed the [or one of the] buffer(s).

First thing you could try - but i don't think it will sort it out (anything is worth a try at this stage)...

Pull your video card out, get a soft tipped eraser...and rub the gold connectors softly...clean out any dust on the fan

insert video card back in, make sure fan is spinning...and try again

well there was a bit of dust but that didnt seem to be the problem.

I live in new york and the other day a storm came in and the power went out for a split second. I am on a surge protector but even so is it possible something could have been damaged?