I am working on a second machine. I have little or no info on this one. I had several different machines but sold them just before an intended move that fell through. Now I am down to only the one in my signature and the one I am working on. The one that wont boot is a second (or third) hand home built machine that according to the screen that it hangs on is running an AMD Athlon processor at 1000MHz with a 30G hdd. It has a Liton DVD-ROM drive and one floppy.
When we were using this machine, it was working pretty much ok. We were running Win ME. It would occasionally hang here and have to be rebooted, but it was seldom turned off so it was not much of a problem. I put Win XP on it when I sold it.
After the sale, the buyer complained of having multiple problems including hang on boot. He took it to a friend of his who for some reason pulled all of the screws out of the motherboard. When I refunded his money and took back the machine, many of the parts seem to be messed with and one of the cd drives is missing, the screws for the motherboard are missing, etc. I replaced the screws and unhooked the dvd drive and floppy after trying multiple times to boot. I pulled the hd out and put it in an external USB enclosure and checked it with my working machine. It seemed to check out. I unplugged the power, removed the mobo battery, and held the power button. I removed and replaced the memory sticks (which were in the wrong place. The larger one was second so the memory showed 256 first and after switching them it showed 384). All of this has had absolutely no effect. The boot screen comes up and shows the bios info, detects the hardware, allows for entry into setup or continue, then goes to the system info screen and hangs. Is this a software (I dont think it is reaching the hd) or hardware problem? If it is hardware is there anyway to pinpoint it? Mobo? How do I identify what mobo to buy that will work with the processor I have?