PC will not boot after major surgery

Before you mess with the BIOS sit down, have a cold one, and watch TV for a while, then when the urge to do something drastic has passed, try this:

Remove everything but the video card, the floppy drive, and one hard drive. Make sure it's connected as Master, and it's on the primary IDE interface. Reboot. If this fails, shut down and swap hard drives, again jumpering as Master - it sounds like you just might have mixed up which is which in the shuffle. If this works, add the other drive and reboot. You may have to get into the CMOS and set the hdd type to AUTO along the way, if there's any possibility that the CMOS lost power in the process, to allow the BIOS to find the disk configuration.

If you can get a valid boot at this point you should be able to add other devices, one at a time, until you have a working system again. I know that it's tedious, but I've recovered two completely dead PC's this week using this process. It is absolutely critical to avoid the urge to make more than one change at a time; patience is essential.

If this doesn't get you started toward recovery, buy a cheap new drive and rebuild the system into something smaller, then add one or the other of your current drives as a slave to recover your thesis. Once that's done, you can fiddle with the thing at your leisure.

Good luck!

The fastest way to find this problem is to remove the sound card. Next put the nic card back in its original slot, and try one hard drive, and then the other.
If all of the old components worked in the old case, the only new causes of a problem canbe the sound card, the power supply, and the change in the nic card.
As I understand this question, this is a swap to a different case. (Usually for more room.)
The motherboard is the same one?
The next thing to check for is cable damage.
This happens during case swaps.
Check the USB cables first. (Unplug them from the motherboard.)
Regards, Chris

Were you working on carpet while changing the case? I suspect that the mother board is dead due to static or short circuit. (80% chance)

To verify:

Take out all the hardware and reconnect them without using the case. You may take out the powersupply from the case too if you want. You just need the following items for the testing:
1. Motherboard
2. Memomry (You just need one or two memory chip)
3. Power supply
4. floppy drive (You do not need a hard drive)
5. Video Card ( You may try an old video card)
6. Monitor

If you have the same thing problem, try to swap the video card or memory. If it doesn't solve the problem, I think it is time to buy a new mother board.

Good Luck

Eddie
Microsoft Certified System Engineer

The Linux/98 problems can be solved later because it seems to me the bottomline is that you are loosing video (after disc setup by bios but before loading of drivers). First I would set the BIOS to default setup. Remove all cards except video and ofcourse ram...try a boot making certain that the drive is configured properly in BIOS and has proper mode i.e. LBA. Make certain that if the video card is PCI instead of AGP that it is pluged into slot 1. and of course do not plug an AGP 2X into an AGP 4X improperly (i.e. 2x plugs in towards the back and the front section is left open) or else trouble will ensue...so I hear.

It is possible that through your experimentation you may have forgotten to unplug the power cord while plugging and unplugging PCI cards...which of course can fry the card and/or the MB....lets hope not huh :)