So the video problem you had, which seems numerous restarts were required to get video going again: you were getting no signal at all to either TV or regular monitor? Totally blind? Ever happen before? Just this one time, or is it now persistent?
It seems to have started yesterday about 5 times in a row, both TV and monitor get no signal, multiple restarts are required to get it working, this has never happened before.
I realised a hour ago I installed the wrong driver for my sound card, actually had two conflicting with extremely slow boots and shutdowns, did a system restore and installed the right one, oddly enough it hasn't happened since but i dont see how this could affect anything before windows loads up, i will do some random power ups and make sure i don't need some other parts for this computer.
I'm so sorry for not paying full attention when reading your first post, and missing a critical part of a sentence: "... and BIOS reports the C drive as BAD. did a check disk for it and had a ton of unreadable sections but it completed".
The first thing I should've posted was to recommend getting an up to date copy of everything you had on that drive that you could not risk losing. Chkdsk, although being a very useful program, is not good to run on a marginal disk (health-wise).
As far as your last post is concerned, no I don't think conflicting drivers would have anything to do with video before Windows even loads. But once it loads the conficting drivers can cause all sorts of problems. Are you always able to get into the BIOS? I mean, with video, of course...
Are you always able to get into the BIOS? I mean, with video, of course...[/QUOTE]
Nope not at all, no signal on both monitors from the second i hit the power switch, also i waited for it to boot into windows and i herd the windows sound effects. Just happened again, this time taking many attempts restarting/switching off the power supply.
Ive been googling this problem for the last two days now, is it possible this is related to my power supply and my hard drives are fine?
Time to go back to "bare bones" if you will... I would try going back to basic video, at least for the time being. Get rid of the multiple outputs and if you can, go back to a video output supplied directly by the motherboard if it's available/possible.
Power supply can cause all sorts of odd problems. Was it exactly a "S.M.A.R.T had been tripped" message or was it something more like "unable to read S.M.A.R.T data".
Were you able to finish getting all your data out of it? If you have to, you could pull the disks and connect them to another machine to finish copying data and then run the tests on them. And while you're at it you can clean the inside of the case and all the components (if you haven't already done that). As you probably know, all that dust and crud in there can cause an array of problems.
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