Black Screen on boot

[Thira]

My computer when powered up, only has a black screen. I cannot boot off a floppy boot disk. I am operating Win 98SE on a KG7 RAID mobo. Never had a problem before. When turned on the unit shoew power ie LED's, DVD burner lights, CD burner. The monitor does not go from orange to green.
Where do I start to trouble shoot? This is the 8th computer I have built from scratch.
Secondly I really need to recover data from my hard drives.
My first impression is that this is a motherboard problem, but I don't know how to troubleshoot this. I am also concerned that since I am using Raid 0, I am clueless as how to recover the data on my Hard drive. I can recover most as I used backup CD's and a third hard drive solely for backing up. But my life would be much better if I can get these hard drives operational again or extract what I want from them.
Thanks so much for the anticipated input.
Thira

 

[Crashman]

Hopefully it's a bad power supply.

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[Black_Cat]

More than likely your mobo is kaput. Try a different PSU first just in case. If it's time to upgrade I wouldn't worry about losing your data. Windows 98 is very forgiving when it comes switching platforms. Most times the mobo drivers load right up and you'll be back in business.

You've tried and failed. The lesson here is, never try again. -- Homer Simpson.

 

[Thira]

Thanks both for the help. I will try a PS first. Believe it or not I had planned to upgrade to a new motherboard (new Aopen for Athlon 64), memory, CPU (athlon 64), video & sound card, and two seagate SATA motherboards on Raid 0 running on WinXP pro.
If it's a bad PS, no big deal. If it is a bad motherboard, what's the best way to salvage files from the old two hard drives (RAID 0) on the old KG7 motherboard?
How would I go about retrieving files from the two hard disk drives presently being used on the Win 98 system if they are on a RAID array KG7 motherboard (RAID 0) running Win98 SE? Do I just add the new motherboard, CPU, & RAM with the old HDD and backup files to a third HDD (I have a HDD that I used to backup) or another HDD on my home network?
Thank you so much in advance again?
Thira

 

[grafixmonkey]

You could save yourself lots of effort by buying a new motherboard that has the same brand (or even better same chip) of RAID system on it as the one that's kaput. If you don't, you can't plug your hard drives into it and have them be recognized as an array. Recreating the array has a very low chance of working, but you can try it. You could try to use a file recovery software on the drives, if there's one that will look at two drives independently and assume they were in a RAID, but that's beyond my experience. Your best bet by far is to make sure your new mobo has the same brand or even model of RAID chip.

In general it's a bad idea to store info that you want to keep on a Raid-0, more so if the raid-0 controller is part of the motherboard. A 2-way Raid-0 has twice the chance of failing as a single drive, but safely ignoring that, you have the issue of it being difficult to access, like you're finding out. A single disk can be read anywhere, but a RAID array requires the specific brand of controller it was created with to be read at all. That's not much of a problem if you have a controller card, but if your motherboard dies you have very limited replacement options.