I found the attached link, but I'm going to post it here just in case I'm not the only bonehead to do this. I got my new P-4 2.6 Gig chip and motherboard at the computer show last weekend, and I was itching all week to put my system back together. I've been doing just fine on my laptops recently, but I would still like to have my desktop computer running for various reasons, one being my WinTV and the other being the hard drive space that my laptop doesn't have.
I put my system together and started it up. I got a POST beep but nothing showed up on the monitor. I literally detached everything but the RAM, CPU and monitor and still got nowhere. I was very close to taking this hardware back to the store. I called two people and did everything I could. I swapped out chips and that didn't work.
This afternoon, it finally came to me. I hooked my monitor up to my laptop to see if it was bad somehow, and discovered that it was set on the wrong mode somehow. I have no idea how or what any of the modes do. All I know is that there are 4 and one of them doesn't seem to do anything.
Anyway, I booted up to find that Windows just wouldn't run. That really isn't a surprise. I guess the new hardware somehow made my existing install not want to work. This is actually the 4th box that hard drive has run in with this install. Actually, it was my wife's drive that I put in my system then put back in her old system when mine died and now it's in my new system. I had to repair the XP installation and booted up into a glorious 800x600 resolution. The first chance I got, I went into display settings and looked at what it could do. My last system couldn't do any better than 1024x768, but this one supported well past 1200x1600, which is what I have my computer at work set at. Of course, somehow I forgot that this is an HP 17" monitor that came with a Celeron 500 Mhz system that was given to me once, and at work I have dual 19" monitors. Didn't occur to me. I set it for 1200x1600, and the monitor said something like "Computer Display Correct?" before it cut off. Every time I rebooted into Windows, it cut off. I couldn't even get it to come up in safe mode, which used to boot in 640x480 every time.
I finally went searching on the web for help, but all I got were screen resolution utilities and adivce for how to set the screen resoultion. I didn't find much about how to fix a boneheaded problem that you created yourself, until finally this Google group yielded it. Haleluia! Somebody else has done this before. Apparently, 2 people have because one asked and one answered. And so, I am passing this wisdom along to any others who may need it.
Reboot computer. Press F8. When given the selection, highlight "Enable VGA Mode". Then you can fix your display resolution by toning it back a little bit.
Hopefully I can at least get 1280x1024.
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