computer hangs at boot up

[papichulo1968]

Im powering the computer and after the post it hangs and stays , on the black screen, the computer says "building dmi pool and that is all she does. I check the memory and all other stuff, cpu, hard drives and all seem fine, any susgestions?? .
this is the setup
the motherboard is generic this is the model M7vkb rev 2.0
duron 950
s3 savage video card
is a socket A with a via chipset
win 98 on it I beleive.
this is a friend pc so Im not really sure weather is 98 or xp.

 

[Green Man]

When Windows 98 starts up, it takes inventory of all the hardware. If it encounters an error it can't recover from, it'll display the error message "verifying DMI pool data" and hang.
First ask the user if he has changed anything recently, or if he has noticed any other problems recently. Sometimes they can give you a clue.
Other than that, you could reset the BIOS configuration to "default" or "failsafe"
If that doesn't help, disable any onboard devices in BIOS or by jumper on the mainboard.
Still nothing, remove any PCI or ISA cards, swap the momory with known good, unplug the CDROM and floppy drive cables...the basic search and destroy mission.

 

[redbeard1]

That can be a bad sign. When I've had that, it usually was that something had corrupted the bios. A bios reset with the jumper, may also help.

Like spookyfish said, pull out or disable everything you can and see if it will go past it. Even pull all the cables off of the motherboard, so all your booting with is ram, cpu, and video.

 

[papichulo1968]

i pulled the hd and encounter several bad sectors, scandisk sort of moved them to the back and the hd was working fine after a while on my second pc, but the hd will not change at all the dmi hang problem, the memory cheched out okay on the other pc, and the video card seems fine I get the bios display, so that's working, the only other pc card in there is the modem, and I took that off also, still same "building dmi pool " So could it be the bios or some wrong on the mobo?.

 

[dnoyeb]

could be the CPU cache died.