PC will not boot up

Things to check...
all cables are hooked up correctly..red stripe on ribbon cable lined up with red cable on power plug for hard drives and cdrom's.
On some motherboards there is a jumper that lets you use the keyboard to turn on the puter...change the jumper setting and see if that works.
Boot the puter without the hard drive in and see if it gets past the post.
Switch the ram modules with known working ram
Switch the vid card with a known working card.
Is this a newly built machine? Or did it work normally for a while then stop working?
Perhaps a bit more info please
Good luck!

Mike

Are you talking no boot with no POST of the motherboard?
Or that Windows does not load?

Installing Windows onto the hard drive in a completely different PC is not a good idea. There are just too many drivers and settings that will be different.

For no POST, 2 things that I have run into a lot lately;

Verify that the video card is FULLY seated in the AGP slot. I often go so far as to remove the bracket from the card just to be sure.

Next, reset the CMOS memory. If the system now boots, then go into BIOS setup, and manually set the CPU and bus speed to properly match your memory and CPU.
Remember that Athlon XP CPUs are "performance" rated. The marked CPU speed is higher than the clock speed!

At this point, it could be either the motherboard or the CPU. I keep spare CPUs on hand to swap out.
It is very easy to damage a socket A CPU when installing the heatsink. Also, any on-time without the fan will damage the CPU.

Chas