Been troubleshooting my system since 2 weeks ago. A power outage and vandalisim occured on my main box. (pc was tipped over & banged around some) I didn't have a good backup image of my boot drive on a 4 hdd Multiboot system running WinXP, Vista, & Win7 all x64. After a few days of cleanup & maintainance I took apart and put back together piece by piece one at a time all components. Pc would still not start. I then tried with minimum components many different times, clearing cmos among other things along the way, a different psu, different internal battery etc, but still no startup. The fan on the power supply spins when i short out the appropriate pins. So I Assume it's the mainboard that is causing it not to start. I use this as an excuse to purchase new mobo, new proc, new memory & new upgraded PSU. So far I've re assembled using existing case with new power supply, new motherboard with new proc & memory... If this happened to you how would you proceed next with priorities being to preserve existing data, OS stability, & performance? Would booting off my already cfg'd [bios.mod](from other hard drives system, boot, primary partition, have any ill effects or what reasons why i should not do it thata way?? versus starting from scratch & doing a clean install after saving data. Edit: after a while i decided to test my new box as is. Entered bios directed it to boot from the hdd with Vista on it, saved and restarted. Chose to boot into safe mode, it seemed as if it was hanging... after 7 to 10 minutes it rebooted on it's own & low & behold it's on the desktop now searching for new hardware... I was very surprised so I let Vista do it's thing until system management bus and base x messages came up which i canceled out of and let it continue like it does from after a bad shutdown. It restarted automaticly a couple times more on it's own until now where i believe it's time to use the new mobo disk... ? Here is where I'm ify, I Don't wanna mess up, undecided if I should continue or save the data, then start from scratch. THanks for some advice & any comments which are very much appreciated. tia to all. I'm a lil behind the curve on the newer procs & such. The new mainboard manual is very good imo... Old parts Gigabyte ep45DS3L F10 Modded C2D @stock 3.16GHz Corsair DDR2 1066 XMS2-8500 New Parts Gigabyte ep55A-UD3 f7 untouched Core i5-750 G.Skill DDR3 1600 PC3-12800