i just tried my optiplex and it worked for a minute. i took out the video card and tried booting it up and the diagnostic lights said different things this time, like "cannot transfer to OS on HDD" and " POST completed cannot access HDD" or something. anyway i rebooted it and it apparentlly worked fine, the lights were all green. i put the video card back in and then booted it again, it went to the FlashBIOS page because i had a Flashed BIOS disk in the floppy. i reinstalled the BIOS and rebooted again. it booted completely normally and attempted to load up the windows 98 that is on the older than dirt 4 gb HDD, it showed the windows 98 screen, then went to a different black background screen that looked like one of the boot screens, but only half way through the description of the sound card and video card and whatnot it said, "windows 98 did not start successfully or something, (i didn't see all of it," and then went back into the "black screen mode". with the same old " memory subsystem activity or failure," diagnostic on the LED.

how can it work for a minute and then crap out again. i didnt touch it or anything when it was booting, it just couldnt read windows and then stopped working and went to the black screen. when i took out the video card again and reattached my 60 gb HDD it still wouldnt boot again.

*for reference on precisely what i'm talking about, please read the previous thread on this board entitled, "major problems computer wont boot please help!."

It's entirely possible your computer is dying. Perhaps a small static charge zapped it somehow and this is its way of telling you to get a new motherboard. <shrug>

If it won't access either HD, then its most likely a hardware issue w/ the mobo; it could be the BIOS or maybe the IDE interface. But since it's an intermittent problem, my "professional" opinion is that it's a hardware problem rather than software. If you're able to, you might want to swap out the mobo and see if that fixes it.

If you want to make totally sure it's not a HD or software issue, plug in a blank HD and try to install an OS. You may get some error messages that can tell you where the problem is.

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