Computer that will not boot up.

[vw56german]

Greetings to all, a neighbor asked me to look at his pc as it will no longer boot. It is an old machine (very old) 333mhz pentium 2 I believe. All he could tell me is that a friend was surfing around "My Space" and the screen went blank. Upon a restart it runs the memory test, seems to locate its drives, the floppy, the HD and the Cd Rom. It gets to a screen that shows drive and PCI data and at the bottom says: "Verifying DMI data" and it hangs there. Now I know it is time for him to get a new PC but if possible he would like to get this one up and running again. I have him searching for his bootable floppy, but I fear that will not turn up. Any thoughts on how I can get a good start up?

Vw.

[cynthia]

Had a similar issue with a computer and it turned out to be the power supplier that needed to be replaced. It always crashed during the Windows startup.

[jmet]

That problem has actually happened to me twice.

The first time it was the power supply like cynthia suggested.

The second time it was a bad/faulty windows driver. Re-installing the OS fixed the problem.

[vw56german]

Thanks for the tips. I did some googling, and found a site called Computer Hope, there was a bit of info there on DMI. I think this is OS related, and probably stems from a virus. If he can find his boot disc I will try a reinstall, if not he will just have to scrap it. It is pretty old and slow so I dont think extraordinary measures should be taken.

Thanks, again.