someone effing help me, computer issues...

[juiceddreadlocks]

okay so this is teh ballz, but here goes...

I can only see the screen when I boot into safe mode. When trying to boot regular to windows, the LCD will show it's getting input but the screen will go black and stay black after the windows XP boot screen where there's a scroll bar. I'm hoping my video cards aren't dying. They are 2 512mb NVidia8600gt cards, made by MSI and hooked into SLI mode...

Can I reinstall the drivers while in safe mode?

 

[juiceddreadlocks]

okay, forgot to say I'm running XP pro with dual monitors, neither will retain the image after the boot screen. I tried hooking them into each of the 4 total VGA plugs.

 

[needtogetarmy]

Re-install the drivers. I believe you can do it in safe mode.

 

[jack sparrow]

 

[juiceddreadlocks]

if that doesnt work what do I do? I had played around in the bios but didn't do anything to the video portion of it, or change PCI/PCIe or voltage, memory etc... all I did was turn the processor up 10%

 

[PWTurbofan]

after you booted in safe mode, did you check Event Viewer to see if any messages were being thrown during from the previous startup attempt? also, did you try booting from "Last Known Good Configuration"?

 

[SaladFork]

First go back into your bios and change everything back to default. Then boot and see if that fixes it. Over clocking your system 10% isn’t worth the risk of overheating and frying everything. If that doesn’t work try eliminating hardware problems. Start by unplugging everything but your mouse, key board and one monitor and uninstall your video drivers, reboot. If that doesn’t work, remove 1 of the SLI cards and boot to single. If that boots, and works switch cards and see if that one will boot. If it doesn’t there is your problem. Motherboards will beep if there is a ram issue.

 

[juiceddreadlocks]

after you booted in safe mode, did you check Event Viewer to see if any messages were being thrown during from the previous startup attempt? also, did you try booting from "Last Known Good Configuration"?

how do I get to event viewer? I did try last known good configuration...

 

[PWTurbofan]

how do I get to event viewer? I did try last known good configuration...

Start --> Control Panel --> Administrative Tools --> Event Viewer

You will want to check the System and Application event logs.

 

[juiceddreadlocks]

First go back into your bios and change everything back to default. Then boot and see if that fixes it. Over clocking your system 10% isn’t worth the risk of overheating and frying everything. If that doesn’t work try eliminating hardware problems. Start by unplugging everything but your mouse, key board and one monitor and uninstall your video drivers, reboot. If that doesn’t work, remove 1 of the SLI cards and boot to single. If that boots, and works switch cards and see if that one will boot. If it doesn’t there is your problem. Motherboards will beep if there is a ram issue.

I did change everything back to default, that didn't fix it. In safe mode I restored my computer to a couple days ago, didn't fix it either. I booted into safe mode again and reinstalled the NVidia drivers from the install CD using Nvidia's utility. After that it booted, albeit a bit slower than usually... When XP loaded, I got a ''cant start kernel mode'' error message, so I googled that and found others with nvidia driver issues like that, so I used system restore to take me back a few days again since it did boot to XP in regular mode this time... blank screen again, so I undid that restoration and this time it booted without any error messages.

I'm not a gamer, I just thought SLi was a pretty neat ability so I got a system I could do SLI with.

 

[SaladFork]

Did you build your machine or did you buy it from someone like Dell?

 

[juiceddreadlocks]

Did you build your machine or did you buy it from someone like Dell?

bought the system put together from a local guy, then I added a couple more gigs of ram, TV tuner, creative sound card, changed video cards, card reader, other stuff like that...

 

[Mr. dB]

if that doesnt work what do I do? I had played around in the bios but didn't do anything to the video portion of it, or change PCI/PCIe or voltage, memory etc... all I did was turn the processor up 10%

Have you tried restoring that setting to the default?