My poor baby

[JFry]

Hi I'm having a horrible problem! My computer has been acting very strange and I'm stumped. It has been locking up randomly and now it won't even reboot. It either posts and then shows a black screen or hangs on "Verifying DMI Pool Data ..............." from within BIOS.

I tried compressed air with no luck, I tried giving it some time alone to think about what it's done.. nothing has worked. Can anybody plz help me?
SPECS:
Athlon 64 3000+
512 ram
80 g wd caviar hd
9800 pro
400w (I think) crappy ps

 

[J_Tweedy]

could be your problem, crappy psu. Got any other parts you can try to narrow it down? RAM, GFX?

 

[JFry]

Hmmm I have 512 Kingston Ram and a radeon 9800 pro.. Come to think of it the problem seems to have gotten worse after I updated my graphics card drivers to catalyst 5.6. But I don't see why this would keep my system from booting up properly. I can't even start windows in safe mode.

The ps is one of my main suspects but the problem seems so random that I have really had trouble trying to narrow it down. Also I have had it lock up during games as well as simply browsing the internet.

 

[Hazar]

can you enter the bios without problems?

 

[JFry]

yes I can enter bios and now that I've waited for a while it has started up fine.

 

[AtomicSpark]

Bad PSU's make your computer either not start or shutoff randomly (happoned to me). It doesnt sound like its the problem but I can't be sure without being there.

 

[JFry]

You can come over I'll buy beer.

Ok it locked up again when I tried to start a steam game. Upon rebooting I got the message:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
<Windows root>\system32\hal.dll.
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

Is it possible a virus is causing this? I haven't updated my antivirus software in a while.

 

[Realbase]

hal.dll sucks

try googling for it.. the are some solutions that work .. but not fo rme .. had to format & reinstall windows last week cos of the same prob.

 

[JFry]

Oh man what a headache. Well I tried googling it and none of the solutions seemed to work for me. So I formatted and reinstalled windows and the problem is still occuring. This leads me to believe it is a hardware related issue. My main suspect is the powersupply, but for some reason I have a feeling it could be ram or mobo. Any ways I'd really appreciate any input you guys might have.