Why hard drive won't boot after adding new agp card

After installing a generic geforce 7600gs agp 8x/4x 512mb into my dell 8250 my 500gb WD hard drive woud not boot (though the bios detected it fine an norton ghost rescue 14 could access the files fine). Reseating the drive and power cables did nothing. I presumed the boot sector got corrupted (power surge?) so I reinstalled the HDD software via disc image and replaced my old card (pny geforce 6200 256 agp 4x) and everything boots fine.

I have a dell 8250 P4 2.8ghz agp2x/4x, 1gp ram on winxpsp3, 533fsb, enermax 620w psu. It ran a evga 7600gs 8x/4x 256mb for years until the card died. Since the then I have been unable to find a new evga 7600gs for less tha $80 (i refuse to pay more for an ancient card) and all the used ones have had blown capacitors. I tried to install 2 different 7800gs cards (bfg and evga) that also would not run for more than a day or not at all. The dell 8250 is notorousily picky on video cards.

I am unclear as to why the HDD would get affected by a failed video card install. Does this make sense, or is it more likely just an accidental ESD event? Any ideas arround the problem? The 6200 card annot run any of the games I like to play.

 

I am not sure but I believe your problem is the motherboard only supports AGP 1.5 2x/4x and the card is AGP 3.0 4X/8X which only supports a .8V signal.

Please read the following paying special attention to Official AGP Compatibility.

http://www.playtool.com/pages/agpcompat/agp.html

 

Looking over that article again, it seem that your GeForce 7800 GS should work with your motherboard. Hopefully somebody with more hardware knowledge than I have will jump in and give their thoughts on this.