Sorry, I'm really not trying to tie up the board tonight. In doing some troubleshooting for my previous post "...no video" i've learned that it may be an issue with the ide connectors. With both the dvd and the hd are hooked up to power and ide on mobo, neither of them seem to work - the dvd drive won't open, and the hd isn't spinning. however, when i unplug the ide cables from the mobo and leave the devices plugged into psu, i can open the drive and the hd spins. Not sure if this woud keep anything from displaying on the screen (the original problem) but is it sounding like the mobo is the culprit here and maybe it's fried? I've tried resetting the cmos by removing the battery and also setting the mobo bios jumpers to every possible setting and no luck.