Computer doesn't even look for windows on start-up

[wruzic1]

howdy all -

I have an old computer that hasn't been powered on for ~2 months but worked find before that. Today I hooked it up to a new TV to use in another room and it starts up fine, goes through BIOS and shows me the RAID controller screen which finds the RAID 5 array and says it's healthy (windows vista is installed on a 3 disk raid 5 array on this machine) but after the raid screen I get nothing - no attempt to load windows, no error message, just a black screen that stays indefinitely. F8 doesn't get me to safe mode, bootable disk in the optical drive gives the same black screen, any ideas on what's going on and how I might save this computer?

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated...

3 1TB drives in Raid 5
2x2 gigs Corsair DDR2
Dual core pentium e2160
Antec 430 watt PSU
Nvidia 8800gt

 

[hang-the-9]

Ah, I see you are running an 8800. My favorite card to point at as the root of all issues. If you had a goldfish that died, I'd blame it on the 8800 card you have.

Swap out the video card, see what happens.

Since you can't even boot of a bootable CD (Linux Live boot or something I assume), it's not the windows setup or raid. And since 8800 card like to die faster than the French surrender, that should be your first thing to look at.