Hi all,
All my boot up problems started a few days ago when I left a non-bootup disk in my a: drive by mistake and started the PC. I run a dual boot system: Win 98 SE & Win XP home, and when I tried starting the PC I get hung at the “Verifying DMI pool…” message. I was able to go into the Win XP recovery console, I ran FIXBOOT for both my C and D (XP) drives, I then ran FIXMBR, and BOOTCFG /Default and added the default OS (Win XP). I was still having problems starting up so I reinstalled both Win XP and Win 98 over the existing installations. I even deleted the BOOT.INI file and built a new one. I was finally able to get to my OS startup menu and I was able to login to my system. What followed was the bizzare part, I was able to restart the system several times with no problems, I was also able to shut the system down for a few minutes and reboot with no problem. However, the minute I leave the system off for more than five minutes or so, I go back into startup hell, and I have to fiddle with FIXBOOT, FIXMBR, and BOOTCFG to get back into either XP or Win98. I have now tested this several times and whenever I am logged on to one of the Operating Systems, I can reboot, and shutdown and start the machine with no problem as much as I want, as long as the period that the machine is off is no longer than about 5 minutes, any longer and the issues return. I thought it might be a motherboard battery problem, however, my settings in the BIOS seem to be holding they don’t revert to the default – which is what I would expect to happen if it was a battery problem. Long story short, I don’t know what to do at this point. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!!!
Homebuilt rig
ASUS AS8 Motherboard
2 hard drives 40 & 80 gigs (western digital)
2 PC3200 500MB Sticks of RAM (kingston)