Freeze during POST

[rogger]

Okay. For some reason, when I turn on this computer, which has had no hardware changes in weeks, it freezes right after auto-detecting the drives. No error messages. The Energy Star logo disappears and the computer looks like it's about to go to the next screen, but the hard drive just spins and spins and nothing happens. The hard drive is a Western Digital 6GB, on its own IDE ribbon. The HP CD-RW and the 48x no-name CD-ROM drive share the other IDE ribbon. Oh, and the mobo is an ABIT BH-6 with the most current BIOS. It's also running Win ME, FWIW.

Before the problem became this bad, scandisk said the size of the volume on the drive was being misreported--every time we did scandisk. And I did a virus scan and it came up clean.

[amierule]

I've also discovered same problem last month....If i'm right
but not sure...it all source from bad RAM....if you have
2 or more RAM in slots..try each one by one..
That all...

[Sylvander]

Hello rogger

I'm using diagnostic charts.

1. You have a boot problem.
2. There is an active display, no error codes and POST appears to run, but the system does not boot from the Hard Disk Drive.
3. You have a Hard Drive Problem.
4. If the system will boot from the floppy you should run a Diagnostics Program from a floppy disk to check your HDD.
5. If an error is reported; is it Software or Hardware related?
6. If Software related; "Check files, Check configuration, Use software diagnostics."
7. If hardware related; is the signal cable ok?
8.If not; replace the cable and re-test.
9. If it is ok; replace the drive with a known good drive and re-test with diagnostics.
10. If the new drive tests ok; the original drive was faulty.
11. If not; the system board or an adapter is faulty.

[ski]

Press and hold the Ctrl key(F8 for Win 95) during startup, select 'Command Prompt', press Enter, type fdisk/status at the C:\> prompt, press Enter, if you do not see your hard drive's status then type dir at the C prompt, press Enter, if nothing shows up then the HD is bad.
If you can see your HD's status, then insert the Windows boot floppy, restart, select 'Start Without CD-ROM Support', press Enter, type C at the A prompt, type fdisk /mbr, press Enter, if still no luck, type A at the C prompt, type sys c: at the A prompt.