i have recently had exactly this problem. the computer would start, boot partway, and end at a blank screen. my problem turned out to be a bad hard drive.
using the windows startup diskette, i was able to boot up into a dos area that allowed me to do a scandisk and defrag. at the end of this i was told that my hard drive had a damaged area and i had impending hardware failure.
this scandisk seemed to straighten out my problem for the short term, and i was able to save my data, then purchase and install a new hard drive.
installing and formatting sucked! my computer is somewhat newer than yours, and my BIOS would not support a large hard drive. of course, the western digital instructions were not as helpful as they could have been, and the diskette they supplied with their hard drive was defective.
once the BIOS was upgraded, i was able to format the new harddrive using the fdisk function of the windows start up diskette. re-installing all my software took time, but went pretty well.
The one beep generally indicates that the processor and mobo are working fine, though you should check your computer manual in case yours differs.
Problem is in a peripheral. I’d say video card or like a previous post, bad hard drive.
Try the aforementioned boot via Windows floppy boot disc. If nothing happens then, I would suspect a bad video card.
As was suggested to me a long time ago on this board (and for which I am enternally grateful), why don’t you give the message boards on http://www.anandtech.com a whirl? Those guys/gals know a heck of a lot about computers
Thanks all. A friend of mine gave me an old video card of his (Voodoo 3500) and my computer is up and running now. I guess my old video card (Matrox G200, how’s that for old?) just burned out or something. Once again, my thanks. And sorry for not responding more promptly.