No display on building new system

[Texan]

My brother is building a new system all brand new parts and this is his 1st build. his motherboard is a MSI 875 and his video card is a ATI Radion 9500 When he powered up for the 1st time he never did get a display on the monitor. we thought that the bios should load a temporary driver to get a black and white display but we did not. The instructions on the video card says to load the driver on the HD 1st before installing the card however that is not possible on a brand new built system. Please help if you can

[mdcomp]

Are you getting any beep codes? Strip it down to the bare minimum of parts, ram, cpu, vid card, see if it works. Make sure it is mounted correctly and no screws are floating around in there maybe shorting out the board. Also, if none of the above works, swap out parts one by one to see whats causing the problem.

[Texan]

No we are not getting any beep codes

[mdcomp]

You do have the pc speaker wire plugged in right? Just thought of something else, too. If what I said above dosen't work try a different power supply.

[Texan]

The previous power supply burned out due to a loose wire touching it and it was replaced with a new 400 watt power supply. The only speaker wire is 4 pin wire marked spkr and it is connected to the mother board.

[mrman17]

I'm guessing its your ram... this would usually cause the comp not to post. Try reseating it.
Also, you don't install any drivers onto your harddrive b/4 installing xp. You don't even need a harddrive for your system to post.

[Carnil]

Is the speaker plugged in correctly? Some case speakers don't work if they are plugged in backwards, and the connector usually isn't keyed.

Not having the drivers installed won't be a problem. All video cards made in the last 15 years or so support text mode (the mode used during boot-up) without needing any drivers, and almost all of them support 640x480x16 VGA mode.