In the middle of my SUSE install the screen froze, during the HD formatting, then went plank after about 30 min. Now, 1/2 the time all I get are a few beeps. If I'm lucky I can get the screen to come up but then it washes right away like a waterfall leaving white and black vertical lines.

I tried two video cards and got the same results. All other cards and additional hardware has been pulled out. The motherboard is an Asus a7n266-VM and I think an AMD t-bird 1.4.

This is happening before the OS loads, not that the HD and CDROM are even connected, so it's got to be a hardware problem.

This is an old machine I pulled out of storage. thoughts? Does it sound like I'm out of luck?

Thanks.

If the install puked in the middle of a partition/format operation, you will have to zero fill it(low level format) to get it working again. Get the necessary utility from the hard drive manufacturer's website.
If you already pulled out the drive and can't get it to POST, I'd suspect the power supply blew which would explain why the install failed. If you have another psu available, try swapping it out. However, when a psu blows, it can take other things out with it so your mb may have been damaged as well. Other things to check are bad ram, blown processor. The beeps you are hearing are error codes. Check the asus website for what they mean as this will help you narrow things down.

Thanks for the advice.

I think I'll start shoping around for a new machine. This machine isn't worth my time. I think I was just hoping for a quick fix but the more I think about it the more I realize this mgiht be the end of the line for this one.

Yes--Kilgore Trout is back again. He could not make it on the outside. That is no disgrace. A lot of good people can't make it on the outside. -- Jailbird [ sorry -- I couldn't resist ]