Date: 12/11/06 (Computer Help)    Keywords: no keywords

I've just been installing some machinery in our CAD facility, and I had one machine that would not load into XP. I got the grey bar of pre-boot, but it died at that point. Rebooting got you the "boot menu" choices, and ANY of those would give you the grey bar, and then die before even loading the splash screen.

I brought it up to my desk here and connected it to my KVM, and it worked. Got it back down there, and it died again.

I put it down to second hand machinery, and dragged a replacement unit from the store. That had Win2K on it, and it BSOD'd on first boot. I swore at that point. Then I decided to try a swap of keyboard/mouse/power leads/network leads to narrow down the scope of what may cause the same issue on 2 PCs. No go. One static grey bar, one BSOD even with different peripherals.

In a fit of irritation, I connected the grey bar rig in place of an operational unit with the intent of eyeballing it until I was calm enough not to reshape it..and it booted fine!

Tried moving the BSOD 2000 rig to there, and that worked too. Hmm. Weird. What had I NOT swapped out before? Um...nothing obvious...well, the CRT, but that's of no relevance..is it? It displays fine in DOS/BIOS/Ghost...

I plugged the CRT from the BSOD/Lockup desk into the machines that were previously there, and...they locked up/BSOD'd again. Changed to another CRT - both worked fine. I then tried this CRT on several other machines (ATI Rage/Radeon/Intel), and they all, without fail, died at boot.

It's a new one on me that a CRT can cause problems this severe, on different chipsets, different drivers etc. Anyone else run across this? I've now pulled and marked the CRT as FUBAR, but it's got my curiousity piqued..

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/computer_help/721670.html