Dell Dimension 8200 - no video signal on booting after power outage

[TeresaB]

Machine was on and monitor asleep at time of power loss. Now most of the time PC will get through Dell boot screen with monitor on fine, leaving 4 green lights at rear of PC but then monitor sleeps. Some of the time the Windows XP launch screen will show but quickly the monitor will show no video signal and go to sleep. At these times I can hear the HD spinning and normal sounds of a full startup - just nothing on monitor. One message I have seen is an error at Checkpoint WAKE.

I have replaced the CMOS battery and re-seated the video card. No help. I can't get to BIOS setup before monitor sleeps. I have made no recent hardware or software changes. Machine has worked fine for many years. I need to replace it but would rather not right now. There is some needed content on HD that is not backed up anywhere.

Machine specs are below. Only mouse, keyboard and monitor are presently attached.
Any ideas to correct this would be much appreciated. If I end up with no solution and have to buy a new computer, I'll need to figure out how to recover some of the HD data.

Pentium 4 2.8ghz
1.5 MB RAM
NVIDIA 7600 GT 512 MB AGP 8X graphics card
Windows XP SP3, current patches
BIOS A01
HP LP 2475w monitor

 

[smorizio]

look on the back of the pc. if the mb has a built in video port see if the port is working. if the gpu has failed it may have falled over to the onboard video. if the video driver is damaged you get that error too. does f8 safe mode get you into windows or does the video cut out too?? from another pc make a hirem boot disk and boot from it on it is mini xp boot if the video works with the mini xp you should be able to pull your data off the drive if you need to reformat the pc.