Missing mbr .... video crash

Hey people, hope all is well with you ..... have a major crash. Running xp on a amd processor with 516 ram and an agp video card. System froze up, did a soft boot and after post it couldn't find the mbr. (Same happened a few weeks ago ... did a repair installation and all was ok.) While trying to recover from this crash, my screen went black .... series of beeps (motherboard says thats video card problem) .... replaced video card with a new one and still black screen. When I power it up, fans run, lights come on, screen stays black and no beeps. Anyone familiar with this .... should I start running tests on powersupply, hard drives, or what. How do I test the motherboard (which I don't think is bad .... had been running @115 F .... though the video card fan looked to be stopped up with dust ....bad boy, bad boy....)
Help!!

 

Thanks for the reply .....actually never got a chance to do anything. Seems like I hit esc. key on first restart and could choose to boot from cd .... but then nothing but a black screen. I need to try to boot from floppy and run a fisdisk.mbr and see it that does it. Won't do anything with the cd in the drive. Have put the old video card back in since it didn't help to put in a new one and there is no way to install drivers for the new one if it won't let me boot up.

 

No ..... it doesn't boot at all!!! Doesn't read either the cd drive or the a drive. Just a black screen. Have hit f8 / esc/ ... trying to get it to show me something, but get nothing. The fans run, LCD lights on the motherboard, but no sound of drives being read, post beeps, etc. Have an xp boot disc in the a drive and the installation cd in the cd drive ...nothing. Wondering if the cmos battery died.

 

Actually, the monitor won't even come on when I turn on the computer .... switch it to my other running machine and it comes on, switch it back to the crashed machine and it goes into stand-by (sleep) mode. Crap!!

 

Here's what I've done, to no avail ..... pulled the cmos battery and replaced it with a new one after waiting a few hours. Pulled the modem card and the ethernet card, disconnected cd and dvd drives, hhd, floppy and pulled all the ram ..... still nothing. No post.... no monitor. Now what?

 

Nothing at all ..... took out or disconnected everything .... same thing, fans run, light on mobo comes on, no post beeps .....
But!!!!! took the hdd out of that computer and put it in a working computer (after disconnecting its hdd) and it fired right up!!! Had been hearing a clicking sound in the old unit, thought it was the hdd going bad, but since I've moved it, its working fine, which leaves me wondering if it was the old comps mobo or the cpu .....
Am also wondering what would happen if I put both hdd in one computer since one is loaded with win xp and the other is loaded with win 2000. Both are formatted as ntfs, but what would happen if I click on the other hard drive? Wouldn't it try to load the os when the other os is up?

 

Again, thanks for the reply ..... been reading up on A+ certification and this must be my practice piece from God!!! I am going to try putting the old system back together and see if the problem still exists ...... don't have my fingers crossed. Have set up the bios on the good computer to auto detect the second hdd, so will install it after I re-test the old one.
Any way to test the cpu in the old mobo?

 

This all started with a post beep code that indicated the video card ..... telling me the mbr was corrupt/damaged, then nothing but black screen and no post at all. After putting the hdd into a different computer, and it working just fine (full post, no problems) I put the video card into the good computer and it worked ....for all of 2 minutes, then lost the monitor. So ..... since my asus mobo (the one that crashed) has no embedded video, I need to get a cheap video card and put everything back and see if it works again ..... although I'm kinda likin the new set up .....