@saint-francis weird as in it isnt an ASCII character that i know of

anyway what i did was cleared the cmos w/ jumpers & removed the battery overnight, & replace the ram and graphics card. after i turned it on today, it had this very same problem :

http://csd.dficlub.org/forum/showthr...52389&posted=1

so i cleared cmos again and now its posting fine, i am able to get into the bios.

cowie,sdgserv what you both said worked thanks a lot guys! hopefully i dont have any problems installing the OS lol. gonna try this again with the old graphics card to see if that was the problem (memory works fine with other rig).