I have just formatted my hard drive, and on boot up I get as far as the 'Verifying DMI Pool Data' message then it hangs. I have tried booting from floppy disks and also flashing the bios but can not get to a dos prompt. Any thoughts?

Bios configuration does not match the hardware. The most common cause is setting memory speed faster than your chips can handle. Set the bios to default settings or unplug the system, move the cmos jumper over one, move it back, plug in and boot.

Did you happen to be going from Windows 95 to DOS operating systems when this occurred? If you did, the problem may be in the master boot record. You cannot readily go back to DOS from Windows 95. You need some program that will erase the entire boot record such as the set up disk that came with your hard drive to return to DOS.

DMI is device management interface. It does not interact with Dos. You certianly received the message well before any operating system was loaded as this is a function of the bios. A problem with the boot record will give you an "operating system not found" error and a floppy drive going turbo. Because you did not get this, it never even got to the boot record. Switching from Win9x to Dos merely requires a sys c: from a dos boot disk. If your hard drive is running fat32, then you must fdisk it with a fat16 partition first, but DMI errors do occur on systems that had never had anything but Dos on them.

Some easy things to try... Make sure your bios is set to auto detect the hard drive settings. Also, make sure the bios checks the floppy first during boot up. If you still can't boot from a floppy, force a rewrite of the DMI file by turning OFF secondary cache in the bios. If this fixes the problem, don't forget to turn the cache back on. If you get to a DOS prompt but still have trouble, rewrite the MBR... fdisk /mbr If none of this works, erase the master boot record with Zap and reformat... http://www.storage.ibm.com/techsup/hddtech/welcome.htm#Drive%20fitness

never flash bios when it works... does it dectect it when your computer first boot up? your jumper setting on hd. is your boot drive on the old or new hd use auto dectect in bios.