System hangs on startup.

[k0nker]

After about two weeks of trying to find out what was causing my problem, I have narrowed it down to a very small list of possibilities, and one of them is Daemon Tools.

On one of my hard drives, we'll call it Phoenix, I had DT installed and a virtual drive running. Everything worked dandy until about two weeks ago. Suddenly my computer would not boot past "Verifying DMI pool data... success." and then a random string of letters would come up. I booted up another drive, Charlie, and messed around for a while, after changing the name of the image file that was loading into the virtual drive on Phoenix, I rebooted on Phoenix and the error went away... except now my screen is highlighted in random colours across the DOS jargon with the boot statistics. Still freezes after DMI pool data.

I went through and moved the .sys files dtscsi and stpd (or was it sptd.. one of the two) and moved the DAEMON Tools folder from my program files. Still the colour error. Changed the image file path back, and got the random jargon error again.

What I would like to know is if there is a way to reset my device manager settings while booted on another hard drive? Or if there is another workaround for this at all.

I was using DT 4.3.0 when this happened.

Many thanks.

[FordPrefect]

This is not a DT related problem.
Causes can be e.g.:

- corrupt CMOS
- corrupt Boot Sector
- damaged Hardware

Did you change any hardware recently?
Just google for "verifying dmi pool data" and you will find an answer ( hopefully ).
If not come back here and we will try to solve your problem.

[Copytrooper]

For sure Daemon Tools (incl. SPTD layer) has nothing to do with it. At that point of the boot process neither SPTD nor Daemon Tools is loaded yet.
That random string of letters sounds like defect cable, hdd, or virus.

[Jito463]

At that point in time, NO software is loaded (not even Windows itself is loading). It's definitely hardware related. Could be one of the suggestions above. It could also be a bad PSU, bad video card (referring to the graphical glitches), bad MoBo/controller, etc. There are a number of hardware issues that can cause this problem. You'll either have to swap parts around to track it down, or take it to a professional to have the computer examined.

[k0nker]

I'm on the computer right now, just another hard drive. As I had said, I narrowed it down to a few things, DT was one that I thought it could be. The reason I believed it to be a DT problem, maybe not DT, but the virtual drive that was created, is because when I change the image that is loaded in the drive, it gives me the colours, but if I make sure the path to the image is like it should be, I get the random letters.

Either way, I've opted to just grab all of my information from that drive while here on my other and just reinstall Windows along with everything else.