cold boots perfect, stuck on splash screen on restart

[ptech]

My desktop boots fine when turned off. even if it's of for a few seconds. But when i try to restart it (to apply updates etc.) it gets stuck on the splash screen (intel) then eventually says it cant find a bootable device. I'm not sure if it's getting stuck on the splash screen or searching for a boot drive as no hdd lights come on, not even for the rom drive. I've put in another hdd and clean installed windows. Unplugged everything but the hdd (USB,pci,cd rom,card readers,etc) Changed hdd cables and ports. Set the pre-delay to a few different times (5,10,15,20s). Updated the BIOS.....everything else works perfect, i think. This is just really frustrating.
cheers

 

[ganon11000]

has it always done this?

 

[ptech]

No only since the old drive started to die. But i would've thought that would be a totally different issue. I also reset the CMOS? Nothing seems to make a difference.

 

[ganon11000]

try booting into a Linux live CD or rebooting from within the windows installer and see if the same thing happens (remove all drives but the DVD drive)

 

[ptech]

OK. thanks. I just finished burning the new Ubuntu to try on an old clacker as iv'e never used linux before.

 

[ptech]

Same thing happened. and i remembered it happened when i did the Windows install aswell. It's like theres no power getting anywhere. Do you think it could be the psu or am i up for a new mb.

 

[ganon11000]

Remove everything but the motherboard, cpu, cpu cooler, ram and dvd drive and see if pressing restart in ubuntu causes issues

*Edit* This is useless to do.
Look in bios options and see if setting to "load optimized defaults" does anything better?

Also, what is the model number of the motherboard?