Here's the short version:
PC was running great, all's good. System specs
MSI 785GTM-E45 motherboard
ATI Phenom II 940 CPU (stock speed)
4GB G-Skill DDR2 800
Samsung Spinpoint F3 500GB SATA HDD
Hitachi Deskstar 500GB SATA HDD
Sapphire HD4870 512MB
Kingwin 1000-watt PSU
Two Lite-On DVD drives
Win7 Ultimate 32-bit
So OK, I installed Magic Disc because I have a desktop publishing program that has 6 discs and I despise having to swap them out over and over again. I have images of each disc and mount them all in virtual drives to eliminate that. I've done it like that for years, but I hadn't installed Magic Disc since I installed Win7. When I did, it installed fine, but when I went to mount a disc the whole system froze. I had to hit the reset button to get it to do anything and then it wouldn't boot. It got as far as the first Windows screen with the spinning circle and the circle would freeze. Nothing I could do could save it.
Luckily I had made an image of that primary partition a few days prior with Macrium Reflect. I installed a new copy of Win7 on a blank hard drive, booted to it and installed Macrium there, used it to restore the drive that locked up. At that point it booted and went to the OS just fine, the backup image evidently installed as it should. But it had done so many off-the-wall things that I decided that a wipe-and-fresh-install was in order.
I formattted the disc that had the image on it and booted to the Win7 setup disc, Win7 installation went just fine until the end. At what I think was the last time it was restarting itself, to finally get to the new fresh shiny clean desktop it wouldn't display. When it went to restart there was no display at all. It had an unusual double-beep and that was it. That's all I've been able to make it do. I've chased my share of computer problems but I am at a loss. Here are the steps I've taken so far:
Remove video card and hook to onboard DVI
Hook to onboard HDMI
Hook to onboard VGA
Remove RAM and try one stick in each slot, one at a time with each stick.
Different PSU
Reset CMOS
Unhook all hard drives
Different (identical) motherboard
Nothing. With the new board I don't get the weird double beep but I also still don't get a display. It's got to be something fairly fundamental, because when it fails to give me a display, I let it sit for a little bit to see if it's going to do anything, and when I press the power button to shut it off it shuts off instantly. No delay at all, like you would get inside an OS.
I am really lost. The only thing I haven't swapped out is my CPU. I've never had one die, is this what that looks like?