Problems booting

[Bosing]

Hello. I'm having a slight snag in booting up my machine. Yesterday I went to plug in a usb hard drive and either my power supply cable wasn't inserted properly or my hand took it out of place, but while the computer was on, the cable slightly came out and the machine powered down (actually it kind of restarted as I went to place it back in - I decided to just turn the thing off and start afresh).

Problem:

Anyway, now, as I go to boot up, the computer powers up fine, but there's no motherboard screen.

Stuff I've tried:

So, what I've been doing is swapping round the SATA cable on my newly installed internal hard drive and swapping round the RAM to boot the thing up. I've also swapped round the kettle lead for the power supply to a new one. Thing is, I've had to do this twice to get the thing working (SATA cable & RAM swap). I tend to get the "Start Windows Normally Screen" before getting into Windows.

Hopefully this isn't serious, or damage isn't made. Might be worth adding that when I'm into Windows, everything is absolutely grand.

Darn machines. Can't live with them, can't live without them.

 

[TriplexDread]

You knocked the USB stick?

You may have broken the separator inside (a small plastic insert to help guiding) and in the process it maybe intermittently shorting out or bent the contacts inside the USB port

Have a look see if you can see any damage in the port

You could always try doing a system restore?

 

[Bosing]

Apologies, my thread wasn't well explained. I knocked the power cable out of my computer while plugging in an external USB drive. Since then, I've had quite a few problems getting the computer to boot.

 

[Bosing]

I'm pretty sure that my problem is the new hard drive. To get the machine to boot up, I'm having to swap around the SATA cable on the drive each time. I can also hear it make a "skipping" noise every five seconds or so.

EDIT: After some more poking around looks like I have a dead hard drive. Well, that about raps everything up. Thanks for your help.

 

[TriplexDread]

Ahh ok did you remove hard drive I take it?

 

[Bosing]

Ahh ok did you remove hard drive I take it?

Mega-late reply (but it looks fairly ignorant on my end):

Turns out that I needed to re-seat the graphics card. My trusty old 8800GT sure coughed up a lot of dust that day.