PC BIOS Hang

[ikonia]

Hi,

I have an old Socket A PC that recently crashed for its user. On boot the error appeared to be bios related as on a restart the clock was out of sync and wouldn't hold time. A quick battery change later and all is well. However now the PC won't boot past random points in the bios - and freezes, randomly.

eg: hangs on "initialising PCI devices" or "updating ESD",

you can sometimes get into the bios - all looks well but once in the bios the screen often freezes.

I'm wondering if something happened to the bios on the initial failure. I'm tempted to flash the bios to update it as I can on occasion get into the ezflash system, however I'd be worried about it freezine mid-update.

I'm not sure what could cause this behaviour.

thanks for your thoughts.

[Hottentot]

Could be RAM failure, try taking out sticks to see if one is faulty otherwise as you say its a BIOS/CPU failure which is going to be tricky to fix.

[ikonia]

shock horror, removed a memory chip - box boots and is stable.

big thanks for the help, pretty obvious when you look at it, but also easy to miss when its in front of your face.

thank you !