Had a really frustrating time recently with a M5ATA Biostar Socket 7 board.
This system is a Pentium 233MMX
Quantum 6GB
72pin EDO or 128pin SDRAM
W/standard floppy, CDROM & SB sound.
It all started with random CDROM errors while reading discs. I thought maybe it was the IDE cables or the drives themselves but I replaced all kinds of parts.
Soon after, it stopped booting entirely freezing at “Verifying DMI Pool Data” sometimes it would say “success” as well, but still no boot. The BIOS itself was frozen and would not proceed further even locking up the ‘control-alt-delete’ function and forcing a hard reset.
I removed the sound, video card, IDE drives, even replaced the RAM and tried every bios setting.
I heard some say this error happens right before it verifies your onboard (not internal) cache, so I tried disabling that and that didn’t solve it either. I cleared the CMOS, replaced the CMOS battery too.
As a last resort, I re-flashed the bios chip with the latest updated version from 1998 (The one I was running was the original version).
Two days worth of frustration, and it was finally functional again.
So… if someone ever comes across this same error, you’ll see tons of other websites telling you to remove or replace ribbon cables or even worse… format your hard drive (which, you can’t because you can’t even boot from floppy if the BIOS hangs)… and the answer in my case was a corrupt BIOS.