Sounds like a dead battery.  All of your CMOS settings would be
reverting to the factory default with every power down, because the 
chip has no current to keep its memory settings.
The next thing to check is if the drive is a master but the jumper
on the drive is set to slave.  What frequently happens in this instance
is that the drive takes a long time identifying itself to the system, and
the BIOS gets tired of waiting and hangs.  I have seen mis-jumpered 
drives boot fine everytime on one BIOS version, with only a modestly
prolonged wait between the memory test and the disk identifier message,
and other bios messages, like "cdrom detected".  Other BIOS only boot 
successfully on the second, third or fourth try.
Tom Turak
Keith Markfield wrote:

> Basically, my friend's comp. just hung as the hard drive would not recognize.  I rebooted and had it automatically detect the hard drive but it seems to have happened again.  Once I had it auto detect, Windows booted successfully adn I was able to move about normally, but once it was shut down, chaos re-occured.  Do you suppose that there is a virus or something along those lines???

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